Publikationen

The movement to promote responsible research assessment has gained ground in recent years. However, as Federico Vasen, Ismael Ràfols, and Emanuel Kulczycki discuss the transfer of these ideas from elite European systems to other contexts presents paradoxes and a range of governance challenges.

Social sciences (SS) research groups play a central role in advancing interdisciplinary knowledge. However, existing studies on the relationship between disciplinary diversity and scientific performance have predominantly focused on high-income countries and STEMM fields, leaving a gap in understanding these dynamics within SS research groups in middle- and low-income contexts. This study addresses this gap by examining the relationship between disciplinary diversity and scientific performance in SS research groups in Colombia. Drawing on national open-access data from the Colombian research groups national assessments (2013–2021), we analyze 3,640 group–year observations corresponding to 1,105 research groups.

Co-authored by Vasily Nalimov and Zinaida Mulchenko, Naukometriya (1969) introduced the term that came to name the field of scientometrics. However, the book itself had limited impact on the development of the field outside the Eastern Bloc. This paper examines how problems of translation shaped the global circulation of one of scientometrics’ foundational texts. We reconstruct the history of the book’s only English version, a 1971 machine translation produced with the Systran system for the U.S. Air Force, and assess its quality using the Multidimensional Quality Metrics framework.

This paper examines the relationship between John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) and the Soviet approach to organize scientific information, focussing on the establishment of the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (VINITI).

This study investigates researchers’ appraisals and experiences with criteria for ordering author names on scientific publications. We analyze survey responses of researchers from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany collected by the Zurich Survey of Academics. We find that researchers give normatively highest priority to criteria associated with the extent of research contribution. Relative minorities also favor alphabetical ordering and special treatment of researchers facing assessment situations. In comparison to these ideals, the practical relevance of research contribution is attenuated at the expense of status-based criteria (academic rank), which researchers normatively reject. Preferred criteria do not differ between genders. [...]

Hostility towards science has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary science communication, particularly in increasingly politicised and digitally mediated public environments. Scholars across diverse disciplines are confronted with harassment, delegitimisation, political interference, disinformation, and personal attacks, especially when engaging in public communication. This editorial introduces the JCOM commentary set “Scholars Under Attack” and situates hostility towards science within broader transformations of media ecosystems, political polarisation, and contested epistemic authority.

In this commentary, we examine patterns of attacks against scholars focusing on the case of Germany. Drawing on the responses to open and closed questions in a recent survey of 2,600 German researchers, we identify context- and field-specific patterns of science hostility. While most responding researchers do not experience severe attacks, those engaged in specific fields may be at a higher risk of being threatened. We argue that attacks on researchers may not be perceived as acts of hostility against scientific institutions but rather emerge in the context of controversial topics.

Nacaps steht für „National Academics Panel Study“ („Nationales Akademikerpanel“) und ist eine Längsschnittstudie zu Promovierenden und Promovierten in Deutschland, die bis einschließlich 2024 vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) gefördert wurde. Ziel des Projekts ist es, sowohl deutschlandweit repräsentative Querschnittsdaten zu den Qualifizierungsbedingungen als auch Längsschnittdaten zu den individuellen Erwerbs- und Karriereverläufen Promovierender und Promovierter innerhalb und außerhalb der Wissenschaft zu erheben. Die Nacaps-Studienreihe ist dabei als Multi-Kohorten-Panel-Design konzipiert. [...] Vollständiger Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:nac2020:1.0.0