![\"Introductory](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1.-esbi-title-slide-1024x576.jpeg\")
Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the 13th annual EBSI-SIS Information Science Symposium on April 28, 2021.
\n\n\n\nThank you very much for this invitation.
\n\n\n\nBefore I begin, let me begin by acknowledging that I am speaking to you from the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, including the x\u02b7m\u0259\u03b8k\u02b7\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam), Skwxw\u00fa7mesh (Squamish), and s\u0259l\u0313ilw\u0259ta\u0241\u026c t\u0259m\u0259x\u02b7 (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I am incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to live, work, and take in the beauty of these lands on which I am an uninvited guest.
\n\n\n\nI want to continue, by way of introduction, to tell you that it is a real treat to have an opportunity to speak to this distinguished group of library and information science students. You probably don’t know this, but although my work intersects with information science more than any other discipline, I work in a Publishing Studies program, which offers a Masters of Publishing degree that is oriented towards the publishing profession. This means I have very few opportunities to address graduate students who might, perhaps, I hope, be at least slightly interested in my research. The MPub students who I teach get to experience a very different side of me\u2014one that discusses the issues I see with technologies, the Web, and how both of those things affect the content industries. While there are graduate students on my team at the ScholCommLab, it is not quite the same thrill as having a whole crowd of you to address directly.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAnd so, when I accepted to give this address, I decided I would use it to get out of my system the kind of advice that I would have the opportunity to give regularly if I were an Information Science Professor teaching at any of your universities.
\n\n\n\nThat’s why the title of my talk is: “The most innovative methods are sometimes the simplest.” (I admit, that in the interest of drawing you in, I almost omitted the word \"sometimes.”) I could have also titled this presentation: “It is more important to ask a good research question than to have a cool research method.”\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBut, I wanted you to come, so you got the more click-baity title.
\n\n\n\nUnderneath what will be a somewhat lighthearted talk are some serious issues that plague academia\u2014ones that I’d be happy to take questions on at the end\u2014that I will only quickly brush upon here. Each one of these issues could be the basis for a keynote. And each one raises questions that I think about because my subject matter is academic careers and scholarly communication, but also because I faced them myself when I was a graduate student.
\n\n\n\nThese problematic elements of academia draw a terrain through which there are only a few easily identifiable paths to success.
Obviously, we could go into more detail about each of these issues and beyond. But I simply want to point out that these\u2014I would say, problematic\u2014elements of academia draw a terrain through which there are only a few easily identifiable paths to success:
\n\n\n\nWhat I want to do with my remaining time today is walk you through how I have managed to, on multiple occasions, use extremely simple methods to shed light on questions in an innovative way. This has allowed me to not get caught up in the disciplinary struggles, nor to find myself playing the game of cranking out endless meaningless publications. I hope that some parts of this trajectory will resonate with where you are at, and hopefully serve you well as you proceed in your own academic careers.
\n\n\n\n![\"Juan](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2.-esbi-juan-at-work-1024x576.jpeg\")
My academic story begins when I was a doctoral student. I had been working in Latin America and had been trying to better understand Latin American scholarly publishing, which is largely all Open Access. I knew I wanted to do my dissertation on this topic. I had worked with three major regional players who, by combining their resources, provided me with access to a directory of every journal in the region, the metadata of over 1300 journals, the download data of the same journals dating back years, citation data for about half of those journals, and more. I also had the distinct advantage of having a computer science background, so I possessed the computation skills to manipulate and crunch this data, plus the mathematics knowledge to be able to understand\u2014even if I had not yet learned\u2014sophisticated statistical methods.
\n\n\n\nI was doing my PhD in a School of Education, and so my own background and the data I had access to gave me a competitive advantage over many of my Ed School colleagues. It became clear to me that, to \"succeed\" in academia, I should deepen my methodological expertise and further distinguish myself from my peers. So I set about trying to do this:
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/3.-esbi-complex-methods-1024x576.jpeg\")
I took a class on network analysis, as well as multiple workshops, and then struggled for weeks to figure out how to run some Erd\u0151s\u2013R\u00e9nyi (Random Graph) models. This approach is the equivalent of using a “normal distribution” in statistics\u2014you can compare your graph and see if it differs from a randomly generated one. I was going to use this to see how national, regional, and international networks behaved.
\n\n\n\n![\"Image](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/4.-esbi-complex-methods-1024x576.jpeg\")
Then I took a class on Natural Language Processing, and I learned how to do topic modelling\u2014labelled and unlabelled, supervised and unsupervised, etc. I learned a whole complicated suite of methods for figuring out what articles clustered with each other, all to see if I could figure out if Latin American scholarship was engaging more with itself than with scholarship from beyond.
\n\n\n\nMy point is this: I had a unique dataset and a massively understudied problem space, so almost any question I wanted to tackle could have produced valuable insights. I struggled, until I realized that what I really wanted to know was who was using this research. I kept trying to find a clever statistical, computational, or quasi-experimental way of answering the question: “Who uses this stuff?”
\n\n\n\nUntil I realized the solution: JUST ASK THEM.
\n\n\n\n![\"An](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5.-esbi-popup-surveys-1024x576.jpeg\")
![\"\"](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/6.-esbi-research-latam-1024x576.jpeg\")
OK, at this point, you might say: \"But this particular solution only worked because you had access to the portals.\"
\n\n\n\nWhile that may be true, I came across the same problem when I was trying to make the argument that social media could allow members of the public to access research. It was the earliest days of what are now known as Altmetrics, and lots of folks had been trying to answer the question: \"Can we know whether the public reads research by looking at social media?” I had just come off the high of doing this super simple pop-up survey, so I thought: How can I replicate this? Say \"hello\" to the creation of Twitter-Bot Surveys.
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/7.-esbi-twitter-bot-1024x576.jpeg\")
![\"Example](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/8.-esbi-tweet-1024x576.jpeg\")
For those of you who fall more on the library side and are interested in documents and textual corpora, the same sort of approach can apply beyond social media. The conversations about the various issues I outlined earlier\u2014those issues about the need for many publications, the rising importance of metrics, etc\u2014all seemed to come back to the incentive structures in academia. The argument I kept hearing was that faculty wanted to do things differently, but review, tenure, and promotion (RPT) committees kept evaluating people in this way. We even saw a proposal to run an advocacy campaign to “change the form” of the RPT process\u2014all based on no evidence.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, our team came up with what was, again, a pretty simple method to determine whether this argument actually reflected reality: we collected documents related to the Review, Promotion, and Tenure process. How? We just emailed people and asked them for them! Obviously, we did some planning around sample sizes, etc. But the plan was simple: collect documents and then check whether the terms of interest were present in the texts or not. Again, this method is not complicated. Instead, what is innovative here is the use of a simple method to answer an important question.
\n\n\n\n![\"Graph](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/9.-esbi-metrics-oa-1024x576.jpeg\")
This is what I want to emphasize: although I have accidentally become one of those scholars who is known for innovative methods, I really don’t think any of these are innovative at all. There are some really clever studies out there using really clever methods, but, in most of my work, I don’t think the methods are innovative or sophisticated at all. Pop-up surveys already existed at the time I used them, as did twitter bots, and checking the presence of specific terms in a collection of documents is about as simple an analysis as you can imagine. What has made these papers and studies successful? Why do I\u2014and, I think, others\u2014consider them to be so interesting?
\n\n\n\nThey ask questions that people\u2014and not just a select few\u2014really want to know the answers to. I really cared about the “so-what” during all of these research projects. When you do that, it frees you from the pressure to get a perfect answer. If the answer is important, having a complete answer is not essential. That is, instead of trying to answer a boring question in a clever way, it is better to answer an interesting question in a boring way.
\n\n\n\nIf the answer is important, having a complete answer is not essential. That is, instead of trying to answer a boring question in a clever way, it is better to answer an interesting question in a boring way.
Ask a good question and look for a “good enough” way to approximate an answer. If your question is good enough, a perfect answer is not necessary.
\n\n\n\nI want to go back to the earliest example I gave\u2014the one about who was reading Latin American scholarship. Did my method control for all demographics? No. Could I have tried to get multiple answers and link them together to form a more complete picture of the users of Latin American research? Yes. What about linking those answers to Erd\u0151s\u2013R\u00e9nyi models? Sure! You could do that. But, at the end of the day, the most compelling thing to come out of my PhD was the answer to a pop-up question: “I am interested in this research article for my personal use.” This view was expressed by 25% of respondents.
\n\n\n\nIt was incomplete, it was imperfect, but, as it turned out, it was also an innovative way to very simply answer a question that everyone in the Open Access movement cared about.
\n\n\n\nBy all means, come up with clever studies, think through all the interesting angles you can, make your research as robust as possible… But my advice is to first spend time thinking about what question you really care about and why.
By all means, come up with clever studies, think through all the interesting angles you can, make your research as robust as possible. Do high quality work. This is all absolutely essential. But my advice is to first spend time thinking about what question you really care about and why. Only after you are clear on that question should you figure out how innovative your method needs to be. It might turn out that, just as with the examples I’ve shown you today, often the most innovative thing you can do is to answer your question as simply as possible.
\n\n\n\nThank you.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/jp825-qn911","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3607","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2.-esbi-juan-at-work.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1619740800,"rid":"trs77-7aa59","summary":" Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the 13th annual EBSI-SIS Information Science Symposium on April 28, 2021. Thank you very much for this invitation. Before I begin, let me begin by acknowledging that I am speaking to you from the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, including the x\u02b7m\u0259\u03b8k\u02b7\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam), Skwxw\u00fa7mesh (Squamish), and s\u0259l\u0313ilw\u0259ta\u0241\u026c t\u0259m\u0259x\u02b7 (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.","tags":["Keynotes","Events","Latin America","Open Access","Scholarly Communication"],"title":"Keynote talk: The most innovative methods are sometimes the simplest","updated_at":1787976069,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/04/30/keynote-talk-the-most-innovative-methods-are-sometimes-the-simplest/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nThis week's post features Kathleen Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher exploring data citation practices\u2014and the newest member of the ScholCommLab. In this interview, she shares her biggest questions about how researchers use data and offers one simple tip to help with everything from paper writing to home decorating.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n![\"Kathleen](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_4715-1024x768.jpg\")
I am a postdoctoral researcher working (remotely from the Netherlands) on the Meaningful Data Counts project with Stefanie Haustein, Isabella Peters, and Anton Ninkov.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nOur project maps out current practices of data sharing, data reuse, and data citation across disciplines. I am especially excited about digging into the 'why' behind these practices: Why do researchers cite (or not cite) data? Which 'data uses' are not cited? How does this all relate to how researchers cite other things\u2014like academic literature? Which patterns exist across and within disciplinary fields, data types, research topics…? I could go on, but I will stop there.
\n\n\n\nI am very proud of my doctoral dissertation, which was awarded a cum laude designation that is not often given out in the Netherlands. It is both exciting and a bit strange to have four rewarding, yet exhausting, years of my life packaged neatly into a book.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am also excited about a book chapter that I am working on with Sally Wyatt, Paul Groth, and Andrea Scharnhorst on interdisciplinarity. The chapter looks at how conflicting ideas about a common concept (in this case, 'users' and 'uses' of technology) can provide common ground in interdisciplinary research.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n![\"Kathleen](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_4726-1024x768.jpg\")
Can I list two?
\n\n\n\nWhenever I was trying to decide to go for something (e.g. a new job, trying something new in school), my mom would say: \"Does it hurt you or someone else? If not, it is probably an opportunity.\" On the whole this has been good advice, but it has also been a bit of a double-edged sword as I sometimes end up with too many \"opportunities.\"
\n\n\n\nMy second piece of advice comes from Thoreau: \"Simplify, simplify, simplify.\" This helps to counter the problem of too many opportunities. It is also helpful in writing academic papers and home decorating.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nFind out more about Kathleen on her website or follow her on Twitter at @gregory_km.\u00a0
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fcb02-8jp78","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3636","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Three-Questions-With-Kathleen.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1620172800,"rid":"283y9-dz268","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. This week's post features Kathleen Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher exploring data citation practices\u2014and the newest member of the ScholCommLab. In this interview, she shares her biggest questions about how researchers use data and offers one simple tip to help with everything from paper writing to home decorating.","tags":["3Qs","MDC Project","Open Data","Postdoctoral Fellows"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Kathleen!","updated_at":1787976053,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/05/05/three-questions-with-kathleen/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nOur latest post features Mario Mali\u010dki, a former visiting scholar and ongoing collaborator at the ScholCommLab. Currently working as a postdoc at METRICS Stanford University, Mario is also a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review. In this post, he reflects on some of the proudest moments of his career and shares why he's most excited about the moments yet to come.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n![\"Scholarly](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/M3-1024x576.jpeg\")
Joseph Costello, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lauren Maggio, and I recently finished an analysis of single comments left for bioRxiv preprints. And I have recently proposed a template for peer review which I will improve based on the feedback from the lab. It is my hope that such a template will help both young and established researchers be more honest in acknowledging and understanding their scholarly strengths, and how they can best help those whose papers they review. The template is supposed to support researchers in conducting and writing their review reports, and help them focus on essential items they should try to address.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am moving in the mid-career researcher stage and have been recently reflecting on the 30+ papers I have co-authored in my lifetime. I remember the pride I felt the first time I designed and wrote a full study from scratch that did not involve my PhD mentors. I also remember the sense of accomplishment I experienced when I finally finalized a project on duplicate publications after five years of work, as well as the satisfaction of posting my last preprint that dealt with preprint server policies and research integrity. Lately, however, I am most proud that I have realized what I want to focus on in the next period of my career: increasing the transparency of peer review. I believe it's time we start making it clear when peer review predominantly provides a seal of approval for a study well done vs when it greatly improves the study's reporting, analysis, or interpretation of results.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am moving in the mid-career researcher stage and have been recently reflecting on the 30+ papers I have co-authored in my lifetime… I have realized what I want to focus on in the next period of my career: increasing the transparency of peer review.
My mum worked as a nurse, so there is a trifecta of advice I always think of when someone asks about advice I've received. Although I remember them in series, I cannot be sure she offered these words of advice one after the other\u2014maybe they just accumulated in my mind over time. The first one was to never use fireworks (as she would treat so many kids who had been badly hurt by them), the second was to use protection (as you don't want to regret your choices), and the third was to live with someone for at least a year before you marry them.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nThe worst advice (I got this twice actually) was that I should back down on my principles if I wanted to more easily advance in academia and not offend senior or emeritus professors. Even though I didn't take the advice, I am glad those words were spoken to me, as they made me realize under which conditions and with whom I want to continue working as a researcher.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nFind Mario on Twitter at @Mario_Malicki
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/817s8-rgh50","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3662","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Three-Questions-With-Mario.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1620777600,"rid":"2t9vt-7h840","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. Our latest post features Mario Mali\u010dki, a former visiting scholar and ongoing collaborator at the ScholCommLab.","tags":["3Qs","Peer Review","Preprints","Visiting Scholar Program"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Mario!","updated_at":1787976039,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/05/12/three-questions-with-mario/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Six years ago, Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein sat down at a bar in Amsterdam after a full day of participating in a conference. They came for a drink and an opportunity to connect over shared interests, but they left with an ambitious plan that would change both of their careers. On the backs of beer napkins, a project aimed at understanding the societal impact of research with the help of altmetrics started to take shape. The gin-and-tonic-inspired grant was successful, and, with that project, the ScholCommLab was born.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAt the time, Juan was a newly minted Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University and Stefanie was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal. More than half a decade after embarking on that first journey together, the two lab co-directors are celebrating a second career-defining moment: tenure.
\n\n\n\n\"Being tenured is a huge milestone,\" says Stefanie, who became an Associate Professor at University of Ottawa, School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) on May 1, 2021. \"I felt so much excitement and relief when I received the (anonymized) letters of the external reviewers\u2014they were extremely generous and kind.\"\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"It is great to be unencumbered from expectations and from any sense of having to prove myself,\" agrees Juan, an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University's Publishing Program as of September 1. \"That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.\"
\n\n\n\n\"That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.\"
Juan Pablo Alperin
The two co-directors celebrate this milestone from a place of transition\u2014Stefanie returning from maternity leave, Juan preparing for his first sabbatical. Both look forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues and continuing the work that has brought them to this moment.
\n\n\n\n\"I am excited to continue working on existing grants on data citations (funded by Sloan) and metrics literacies (funded by SSHRC) and one on open science practices that we recently received from the Wellcome Trust,\" Stefanie says. \"But what I am most excited about is seeing the Ottawa team and students face to face again\u2014it's been way too long and I miss everyone!\"
\n\n\n\n\"I am using this opportunity to reconnect with my colleagues in Latin America,\" Juan explains. \"There is a lot of interest in the region to develop Open Science policy, and so I have been reaching out to everyone I know to see how I can be most helpful.\" He's also been applying for several major grants, with the hope of returning from sabbatical to a very active lab.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n![\"ScholCommLab](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/stef-juan-ottawa-1024x576.jpg\")
While both are grateful to start this next chapter of their careers, neither expects that their new title will change the nature of their work.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"I've never been a really strategic person, so my research has always focused on what I am most interested in rather than what looks good on my CV,\" Stefanie explains. \"I don't anticipate that having tenure will actually influence how I work or what I work on.\"
\n\n\n\n\"I became a tenured professor doing the things I love, not doing what others wanted me to do,\" Juan explains. For him, the key to tenure was \"to think about it enough to make sure I participated in and accomplished the things I wanted to showcase to the committee, but not enough that I lost sight of myself while trying to tick boxes.\" He adds that, to get tenure, \"You want to do you.\"
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/zy45r-1q406","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3690","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/stef-juan-ottawa-scaled.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1630972800,"rid":"7mp6h-9xm33","summary":"Six years ago, Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein sat down at a bar in Amsterdam after a full day of participating in a conference. They came for a drink and an opportunity to connect over shared interests, but they left with an ambitious plan that would change both of their careers. On the backs of beer napkins, a project aimed at understanding the societal impact of research with the help of altmetrics started to take shape.","tags":["News","People","RPT"],"title":"Double tenure: ScholCommLab co-directors celebrate a career milestone together","updated_at":1787976024,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/09/07/double-tenure/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"From data sharing mandates to clinical trial registration, Open Science (OS) policies for biomedical research are in no short supply. But ensuring those policies become real-world practices can be a challenge\u2014particularly when there's no simple way to measure success. Launched in Fall 2021, the Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project hopes to overcome this barrier by helping research organizations track the use of the OS practices that matter most to their communities.
\n\n\n\n\"The reality is that just creating a policy for an open science practice isn’t sufficient in terms of its actual implementation,\" explains Kelly Cobey, a Scientist at University of Ottawa Heart Institute and primary investigator on the project. \"A policy is only as good as the adherence to it, so we want to make sure that we have a way for organizations to actually monitor that compliance.\"
\n\n\n\n![\"Kelly](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Kelly-Cobey-Jenn-Ganton-Shots-1024x683.jpg\")
The Wellcome-funded project is a collaboration involving 80 researchers and stakeholder participants from 20 institutions around the world. It is led by an international team of researchers that includes ScholCommLab co-directors Stefanie Haustein and Juan Pablo Alperin, as well as leading scholars such as David Moher, Cameron Neylon, Emily Sena, Justin Presseau, Lars Hemkens, Rodrigo Costas, Thed van Leeuwen, Ulrich Dirnagl, and Daniel Strech. The project takes a novel approach that is part research, part action. The goal is to create a community-informed automatic dashboard that will allow institutions to track how consistently members are using recommended OS practices. Beyond measuring progress, the dashboard could be used to identify areas in which more support or training is needed.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"Right now it seems like funders or policymakers come up with a policy and then tell institutions: 'Okay, you have to do this now.' Then institutions say: 'Okay, researchers, you have to do this now.' But the researchers are left in a situation where they may not be aware of why or how to comply with the OS practice and may not feel supported,\" Cobey explains, \"No one coaches them through it. That’s why you see the gap between policy and implementation.\"
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/charite-os-dashboard-1024x317.png\")
The project builds on the foundations laid out by Charit\u00e9's custom OS dashboard and Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative's (COKI) open access (OA) dashboard. It will monitor a range of OS practices, much like the Charit\u00e9 dashboard, but will be developed, tested, and refined to reflect those practices that are seen as most valuable to stakeholders at biomedical institutions across the world. It's being created by the community, for the community.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"A lot of times people just get an idea and make a prototype, but after investing all that time and money and funding, they find that the tool doesn’t resonate with the community,\" Cobey says, \"We’re trying to circumvent that by involving them in the process and the user-design.\"
\n\n\n\nTo identify the OS practices that should be included in the final dashboard, the project employs what Cobey calls an “integrated knowledge mobilization” approach. This includes using the Delphi survey method, which allows researchers to iteratively gather and integrate feedback from stakeholders throughout the research and prototyping process. This process involves a cycle of surveying stakeholders, synthesizing key findings and presenting them to participants, gathering feedback, and finally integrating that feedback into the next set of survey questions. The Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project team is currently knee-deep in the survey cycle, but hopes to publish a preprint of the final results in summer 2022.
\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/delphi-1.png\")
To ensure the final dashboard is useful across multiple biomedical research contexts, Delphi participants were recruited to support broad representation of geographies, genders, and career stages. Cobey says that the diversity of participating stakeholders has already yielded important insights. \"It’s been really eye opening,\" she says, \"you have all these people with good intentions thinking about public accessibility, but not every intention is feasible in every local context.\"
\n\n\n\nTake, for example, the question of whether to include Open Access (OA) publishing in the dashboard. While OA compliance seemed like an obvious activity to include, Cobey says deciding on the right metric to track was complicated by international differences in policies and resources. In line with the recommendations laid out in Plan S, many European participants indicated in round 1 and 2 surveys that they wanted to track Gold OA (i.e., publication of articles in openly available journals). But scholars from regions with different OA policies, such as Nigeria and Latin America, felt that this would be inequitable. In biomedicine, publishing Gold OA typically requires researchers to pay high Article Processing Charges (APCs), which can be inaccessible for scholars with fewer resources. Scholars from these regions made it clear that they would not want to be benchmarked against the European standard.
\n\n\n\n\"Had I, from here in Canada, just come up with a metric, I might not have had that perspective,\" Cobey reflects. \"That’s why I think it’s so important to have a diversity of views.\"
\n\n\n\n\"As researchers and research institutions, there’s the responsibility to maintain these best practices. We're excited to provide a tool that makes that responsibility a little bit easier.\"
Kelly Cobey
It's still early days for the project, and there's lots of work to be done. But Cobey is hopeful about what lies ahead. \"We know that Open Science practices can increase the usability of research, support reproducibility, and reduce bias\" she says. \"At the end of the day, if we don’t publish our results, or we report them in a way that’s biased, it’s unethical. As researchers and research institutions, there’s the responsibility to maintain these best practices. We're excited to provide a tool that makes that responsibility a little bit easier.\"
\n\n\n\nTo stay up to date with the Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project, sign up for the ScholCommLab newsletter.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a83j5-b6d16","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3805","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OS-dashboard-feature.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1646179200,"rid":"2r8mk-ztg54","summary":"From data sharing mandates to clinical trial registration, Open Science (OS) policies for biomedical research are in no short supply. But ensuring those policies become real-world practices can be a challenge\u2014particularly when there's no simple way to measure success.","tags":["Research","Grants","Metrics","Open Access","Open Data"],"title":"Turning policy into practice: The Biomedical Research Open Science Dashboard project","updated_at":1787976010,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/03/02/turning-policy-into-practice-the-biomedical-research-open-science-dashboard-project/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"ScholCommLab"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nOur latest post features Olivia Aguiar, a lab manager at the ScholCommLab and a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University's Injury Prevention and Mobility Lab (IPML). In this Q&A, she tells us about creating science comics, interviewing “super seniors,” setting boundaries, and more.
\n\n\n\n![\"Olivia](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_5770-1024x768.jpg\")
I'm so excited to be joining the ScholCommLab as a Lab Manager. My tasks include coordinating lab and project team meetings; updating the blog, website, and newsletter; collaborating on grant proposals; and supporting the lab directors in communication and outreach. I look forward to meeting the entire team and embarking on this new journey!
\n\n\n\nI recently completed my certificate in Biomedical Visualization and Communication (BMVC) at The University of British Columbia. During the program, I learned that I love to illustrate scientific and health comics. Currently, I’m working on a short comic about concussions in ice hockey. My goal is to finish the final version by the end of Summer 2022. Stay tuned on social media (@livsaguiar) to see the result!
\n\n\n\n![\"Olivia](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_1956-1024x683.jpg\")
I interviewed \"Super Seniors\"\u2014individuals aged 85 years or older who have never been diagnosed with a major medical concern (e.g. heart disease, cancer, dementia)\u2014for the Healthy Aging Study at BC Cancer. My colleague and I summarized their advice on how to live a long, healthy life. My personal favourites include: \"Kindness doesn't cost anything,\" \"Consider life as an adventure,\" and \"Do good for others but also look after yourself.\" Their words provide me with perspective and inspiration\u2014especially during uncertain and challenging times.
\n\n\n\nAs for professional advice, the best and worst I’ve received: \"If you want something done right, do it yourself.\" This mantra got me through university. It helped me build resilience, solve problems, and achieve success in volunteer and leadership positions. But this advice also led to many, many bouts of stress and burnout. I learned (the hard way) that sometimes there is a better person for the job. Now, I know there is a difference between pushing out of your comfort zone and pushing beyond your limits. I embrace team work and collaboration in the classroom and work place. It is brave to ask for help!
\n\n\n\nFind Olivia on Twitter at @livsaguiar
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/k7ts4-4wm50","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3888","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Three-Questions-With-Olivia-Aguiar.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1649808000,"rid":"nvrmm-z6r05","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. Our latest post features Olivia Aguiar, a lab manager at the ScholCommLab and a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University's Injury Prevention and Mobility Lab (IPML). In this Q&A, she tells us about creating science comics, interviewing \"super seniors,\" setting boundaries, and more.","tags":["3Qs","Health Communication","Science Communication"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Olivia!","updated_at":1787975995,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/04/13/three-questions-with-olivia/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"![\"\"](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/AdobeStock_50015588-1024x683.jpeg\")
\"Denying a professor tenure, Harvard sparks a debate over ethnic studies,\" reads a New York Times story published in January 2020. \"After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she is seeking justice,\" a more recent headline proclaims. \"Academic tenure: In desperate need of reform or of defenders?\" asks another.
\n\n\n\nThese headlines offer a taste of the debate that has played out about academic review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process over the last two years. In the wake of several high-profile cases\u2014most of which involve women or BIPOC scholars who were denied tenure without any clear cause\u2014institutions are under pressure to reevaluate the way in which they make decisions about who gets to stay \"in\" and who is ultimately pushed out. At the heart of this reckoning are questions about the hidden, implicit values and biases that shape the nature of RPT decisions. In the system that ultimately has the final say about faculty careers, these factors are too often left unsaid.
\n\n\n\nOver the past 5 years, the ScholCommLab has worked to shed light on these factors and build critical understanding of the nature of the RPT process. Through a series of mixed-method studies, the research team analyzed RPT documents and surveyed scholars from 129 institutions across Canada and the US. Their work has already shed light on many problematic aspects of the RPT process, including an overreliance on flawed metrics, an undervaluation of public forms of scholarship, and unclear and circular definitions of important terms like \"impact\" and \"prestige.\"
\n\n\n\nNow, in its sixth and final study, the research team has turned its attention to another controversial aspect of the RPT process: collegiality.
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Image1-1024x576.png\")
\"Collegiality can be a bit of a double-edged sword,\" explains DeDe Dawson, an Associate Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan and lead author of the new study. \"It is difficult to assess fairly because it is amorphous and subjective in nature, but if it is not defined it has the potential to be misused to enforce homogeneity, stifle dissent, or as a cover for discrimination.\"
\n\n\n\nPeople define the term \"collegiality\" differently, but at its most basic level, it relates to the quality of relationships. In academic contexts, it's usually used to describe the ways in which faculty members interact, collaborate, and share responsibilities with each other. Whether collegiality should be formally included in RPT processes is an ongoing controversy that has intensified following the recent high-profile tenure-denial cases. Even when collegiality is not formally included in the RPT process, however, survey data suggests that faculty members consider it to be a factor shaping the RPT decisions at their institutions.
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Quote2-1024x576.png\")
To better understand this apparent contradiction, DeDe worked with Esteban Morales, Erin McKiernan, Lesley Schimanski, Meredith Niles, and Juan Pablo Alperin to examine whether and how \"collegiality\" featured in a sample of more than 850 RPT documents. The results, published April 6th in PLOS ONE, suggest that collegiality and related terms do appear in at least some RPT documents, particularly those at research-focused universities. When these terms are mentioned, however, the team found that the descriptions tend to be brief at best, providing little information about what \"collegiality\" actually means or how it would be formally assessed.
\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Quote3-1024x576.png\")
For DeDe, the lack of clarity surrounding collegiality is concerning: \"If this term is left undefined, it could be weaponized to punish those who don't 'fit in,'\" she says. \"It opens it up to be an informal criterion for excluding people based on personal biases.\"
\n\n\n\nBut while the findings are bleak, DeDe is not. \"I hope our results will motivate departments to begin discussing how best to handle these situations in their own RPT documents and processes,\" she says. \"Individual faculty members also have a role to play: call out the biases you see playing out on tenure committees. Suggest changes to your RPT standards to recognize and reward collegial behaviours. Work with your colleagues to ensure your department's RPT documents include clear, equitable reflections of what you value.\"
\n\n\n\nWant to learn more about the RPT project? Read the full study at PLOS ONE or visit the ScholCommLab website to learn more about the RPT project.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/z8waj-z7m94","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3978","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Image1.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1650844800,"rid":"3qg03-4jx80","summary":"\"Denying a professor tenure, Harvard sparks a debate over ethnic studies,\" reads a New York Times story published in January 2020. \"After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she is seeking justice,\" a more recent headline proclaims. \"Academic tenure: In desperate need of reform or of defenders?\" asks another.","tags":["Preliminary Findings","Research","New Results","Research Institutions","RPT"],"title":"Not \"collegial\" enough: New study examines unsaid criteria in the tenure process","updated_at":1787975981,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/04/25/not-collegial-enough-new-study-examines-unsaid-criteria-in-the-tenure-process/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nThis week’s post features Fatou Bah, a master’s student in the School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) at the University of Ottawa (UOttawa), Data Support Specialist in\u00a0Research Data Management\u00a0at the UOttawa Library, and research assistant at the ScholCommLab. She tells us about her work in cognitive accessibility, taking her own advice, and more.
\n\n\n\n![\"Fatou](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/3207D210-9A53-4DC4-A861-F2821C4D48AA-819x1024.jpg\")
I just joined the lab and will be working on my master's thesis with Stefanie Haustein. My research background is in cognitive accessibility\u2014helping people of all cognitive abilities process information. I believe everyone should have access to information regardless of their disability status. My research focuses on how database accessibility impacts the search behaviour of academics with cognitive disabilities. This is especially important for individuals working and studying in higher education, where searching through databases is critical to completing their work.
\n\n\n\nI recently had the opportunity to guest lecture, which was exciting. It was for an ethics and social responsibility course. I discussed how technology supports cognitive function and the barriers to adopting this technology (e.g., lack of cognitive accessibility). I also talked about how persons with cognitive disabilities are at higher risk of privacy threats. Caution needs to be exercised when developing technologies for this population.
\n\n\n\nThat's a tough one. I can't recall any instance where someone has given me advice on something or where I asked for someone's advice. If someone has, clearly I haven't taken it.
\n\n\n\nFind Fatou on Twitter at @Fatou_Bah1.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/7faah-hyf74","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3963","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Three-Questions-With-Fatou.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1651536000,"rid":"ntg3x-y7j59","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. This week's post features Fatou Bah, a master's student in the School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) at the University of Ottawa (UOttawa), Data Support Specialist in Research Data Management at the UOttawa Library, and research assistant at the ScholCommLab.","tags":["3Qs","Altmetrics","Open Data"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Fatou!","updated_at":1787975966,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/03/three-questions-with-fatou/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"![\"visual](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Infographic-1-RPT-Research-Project-Overview-Full-Resolution-1024x791.png\")
The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBetween 2017 and 2022, we conducted a multi-year research project involving the collection and analysis of more than 850 RPT guidelines and 338 surveys with scholars from 129 research institutions across Canada and the US. Starting with a literature review of academic promotion and tenure processes, we launched six studies applying mixed methods approaches such as surveys and matrix coding.
\n\n\n\nSo how do today’s universities and colleges incentivize open access research? Read on for 6 key takeaways from our studies.
\n\n\n\n![\"Juan](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/5-Public-Dimensions-of-Faculty-Work-and-its-RPT-Signifance-01-1024x1024.png\")
In a study published in eLife in 2019, we assessed the degree to which RPT documents included guidelines specific to open access, open data, and open education.
\n\n\n\nWe found that while institutions want faculty to engage in public outreach, there are no explicit incentives or structures to assess contributions to public scholarship. Faculty were rewarded for traditional research outputs and citations. \"Public\" and \"Community\" are terms often mentioned in RPT documents, yet outputs of public scholarship were viewed as service contributions\u2014not research. Only 5% of institutions mentioned \"Open Access\" in their RPT documents.
\n\n\n\n![\"Juan](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/3-Value-of-Non-Traditional-Scholarly-Outputs-for-Promotion-and-Tenure-01-1024x1024.png\")
So if there were no incentives for public scholarship, what kinds of outputs were mentioned in the RPT guidelines? In this book chapter for the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management (2020), we explored how non-traditional outputs are assessed in promotion and tenure.
\n\n\n\nAround 95% of institutions mentioned traditional outputs such as journal articles and book chapters. A diversity of research outputs, such as open data sets, software, or works in progress, were found in RPT documents extending across institution types and disciplines. While research activities are beginning to be recognized more broadly, our findings suggest that current structures of faculty assessment have yet to recognize the value of non-traditional scholarly outputs.
\n\n\n\n![\"Esteban](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/We-are-also-judged-on-collegiality-which-is-nebulous-due-to-a-lack-of-clear-policy-on-the-criteria-1024x576.png\")
In this study (published in PLOS in 2021), we wanted to know how faculty define common research terms used in RPT documents.
\n\n\n\nWe found that faculty often defined “quality,” “impact,” and “prestige\" in circular and overlapping ways. Researchers and their colleagues applied their own\u2014and often different\u2014understanding of these terms. Interestingly, the varying definitions did not relate to age, gender, or academic discipline. Our findings suggest that we can't rely on these ill-defined and highly subjective terms for evaluation.
\n\n\n\n![\"Erin](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/4-Use-of-Journal-Impact-Factor-in-Academic-RPT-01-5-1024x1024.png\")
In a study published in e-Life in 2019, explored the use of Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in RPT documents. We analyzed how faculty defined and mentioned this controversial metric.
\n\n\n\nWe found that only 23% of institutions mentioned \"impact factor\" explicitly in the RPT documents. While this may seem low, there were over a dozen terms used that faculty may associate with JIF without stating it explicitly, including: \"prestigious journal,\" \"leading journal,\" and \"top journal.\" Despite little to no evidence that JIF is a valid measure of research quality, there is still pressure to publish in high-JIF venues, which limits the adoption of open access publishing.
\n\n\n\n![\"Meredith](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/3-Faculty-Publishing-Values-and-RPT-Expectation-01-2-1024x1024.png\")
In another publication (published in PLOS in 2020), we examined what drives faculty to publish where they publish. The results were surprising.
\n\n\n\nWhile faculty prioritize readership when submitting their work for publication, they believe their peers are driven by journal prestige and metrics (such as impact factor). Next to readership, faculty cared about journal prestige and journals which their peers read. As for the RPT process, faculty thought they would be evaluated based on publication quantity and prestige\u2014but this perception varied across age, career stage, and institution type.
\n\n\n\nIn our sixth\u2014and final\u2014publication (published this year in PLOS), we explored whether and how \"collegiality\" is used in the RPT process.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nWhile \"collegiality\" was hardly ever defined in RPT documents, faculty we surveyed said that it plays an important role in the tenure process. Faculty from research-intensive universities were more likely to perceive collegiality as a factor in their RPT processes. Our results suggest that clear policy on \"collegiality\" is needed to avoid punishing those who don't “fit in.”
\n\n\n\nSince starting this project more than 5 years ago, our papers, blog posts, and tweets have been viewed and shared thousands of times. They've been covered in more than 15 news stories and blog posts, including in Nature, Science, and Times Higher Education. We're hopeful that this wide visibility is a first step towards reimagining the RPT process so that it better reflects the types of scholarship that faculty members themselves want to see in the world.
\n\n\n\nSo where do we go from here?
\n\n\n\n![\"Promising](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/6-Use-of-Journal-Impact-Factor-in-Academic-RPT-01-2-1024x1024.png\")
In all of our papers, the overarching conclusion is the same: There’s room for values-based assessments in the RPT process. We need to move away from measuring outputs or judging faculty by ill-defined concepts and move towards rewarding the values, processes, and ways in which people work. As we bring the RPT project to a close, we'd like to highlight two initiatives that have started to pave the way:
\n\n\n\n1. The Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative generates and supports values-based approaches for scholarly life including review, promotion, and tenure. Their paper, Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy, offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to improve and strengthen the impact of all scholarly work. It features work by our lab, challenges academics to reform and rethink the RPT process, and suggests ways to align faculty expectations with institutional values. We invite you to read HuMetricsHSS' work and reflect on the values that you would like to see considered in your institution's RPT process.
\n\n\n\n2. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a worldwide initiative recognizing the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. They offer recommendations, resources, and case studies on best practices for research assessment. We encourage you and your institution to read, sign, and adopt DORA, to improve the evaluation of scholarly output.
\n\n\n\nFinally, we hope this work inspires you to reflect on your own role in upholding the status quo in the RPT process\u2014and the power you have to change it. As Juan Pablo Alperin says \"I invite you to begin a conversation by sharing with your colleague why access to research matters. Because it does.\" By sharing our values and thoughts on the RPT process, we can cultivate an academic culture that rethinks research assessment for the greater good.
\n\n\n\nWe would like to thank and acknowledge the team behind the RPT project which includes: Erin McKiernan, Meredith Niles, Lesley Schimanski, Carol Mu\u00f1oz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Michelle La, Esteban Morales, Diane (DeDe) Dawson. Without your contributions, this work would not have been possible!
\n\n\n\nFor more about the review, promotion, and tenure project, check out the project website, visual overview, blog posts, and media coverage.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/b75m0-2y502","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=4011","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Infographic-1-RPT-Research-Project-Overview-Full-Resolution.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1651622400,"rid":"5s3zz-pjk72","summary":"The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research.","tags":["Article Summaries","Research","New Results","Research Institutions","RPT"],"title":"Rethinking Research Assessment for the Greater Good: Findings from the RPT Project","updated_at":1787975951,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/04/findings-from-the-rpt-project/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"![\"Knowledge](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/MetricsLiteracies-1024x858.jpeg\")
Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index\u2014which is defined as the \"h number of papers with at least h number of citations.\" This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.
\n\n\n\nAlthough simple, the h-index is flawed and often applied inappropriately. It’s been criticized due to inconsistencies, lack of field normalization, database-dependence, and time-dependence. Yet the h-index continues to be used for hiring, review, and tenure.
\n\n\n\nLauren Maggio, professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, has witnessed how academics misuse metrics in high-stakes decisions. Across her career, sitting on many hiring committees, she has \"unfortunately seen candidates compared in relation to their h-index,\" despite its shortcomings.
\n\n\n\n\"It's really important that people understand how these metrics are created, that they understand some of the biases and issues that are baked into these metrics that may disadvantage some groups,\" she says. In this post, Lauren tells us about the ScholCommLab's recent work characterizing available educational videos on the h-index.
\n\n\n\n\"It's really important that people understand how these metrics are created, that they understand some of the biases and issues that are baked into these metrics that may disadvantage some groups.\"
Lauren Maggio
The project, led by Stefanie Haustein, co-director of the ScholCommLab, aims to improve the appropriate use of scholarly metrics in academia. The team is developing educational videos and evaluating their efficiency in a randomized controlled trial to teach academics \"Metrics Literacies,\" the skills and knowledge to recognize, interpret, critically assess, and effectively and ethically use scholarly metrics.
\n\n\n\nThe multidisciplinary team consists of bibliometric experts, video producers, and online education specialists, including Lauren. \"Stefanie asked me to jump on this because of some of the work I've been doing in the medical education space,\" she says. They decided to start by developing open educational resources about the infamous h-index.
\n\n\n\nBefore making their own content, the team assessed the landscape of existing educational videos on the h-index. By understanding available resources, Lauren believes that they could \"get a sense of how people were actually talking about the h-index, what it is, issues with it\" to identify content for their own future initiatives. \"We could find good things to do for our own videos or bad things that we knew we wanted to avoid,\" she added.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn their first study, recently published in PLOS ONE, the Metrics Literacies team examined the characteristics of available educational videos on the h-index. They identified more than 247 videos to get a sense of how the h-index is described and presented. \"We watched a ton of YouTube,\" laughed Lauren.
\n\n\n\nOnly 31 videos met the inclusion criteria (English-speaking, less than 10 mins long, and actually about the h-index). At least two of the authors independently coded each of the videos based on their content, presentation style, and educational quality.
\n\n\n\nSpecifically, the team used Cognitive Load Theory\u2014an instructional theory to guide educational design\u2014to evaluate whether the video format actually helped people learn. Based on this theory, ideal educational videos should be designed to balance three types of cognitive load:
\n\n\n\nTheir results suggest that when it comes to building literacies about the h-index, the scholarly community has a long way to go.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n![\"Elements](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/UdgZVvYQ-1024x510.jpeg\")
Most of the videos used elements to balance cognitive load. 90% of videos used signaling (or cues highlighting important details) and 71% used dual channel approaches (like animated text with voice-over explanations) to enhance cognitive processing and reduce germane load. 42% of videos actually addressed the viewer, reducing extraneous load.
\n\n\n\nInterestingly, only one video included an interactive learning element. 97% of videos did not pause to ask a question, pose a reflection, or attempt a calculation\u2014which are tools that can facilitate the learning process. The lack of interaction in the videos could be due to the nature of the medium, but Lauren believes \"It is possible to do those things. They just weren't taking advantage of that.\"
\n\n\n\nThe research also made it clear that there is lots of room for when it comes to minimizing distractions unrelated to learning. 55% of video included non-productive distractions, which increases extraneous load. Lauren found the distractions to be extreme in several of the videos. \"You could hear birds, pretty loud, that would just really distract you, or they would be doing a screencast and just be moving their mouse everywhere,\" she recalls. She recommends that future initiatives should try to be more mindful of reducing these extraneous elements.
\n\n\n\n![\"Content](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/W1_LYxOA-952x1024.jpeg\")
While most videos defined or calculated the h-index, 48% of videos did not mention any caveats. There were no mentions of disadvantages to early career researchers (77%), database differences (71%), or disciplinary differences (61%). In fact, Lauren saw that \"There were presenters very much proposing and helping viewers to think about how to boost their h-index, which shouldn't really have been a surprise.\" The lack of critical reflection in the videos fails to provide transparency on the shortcomings of the h-index.
\n\n\n\n68% of the videos displayed amateurish production quality. These videos had poor camera angles, audio quality, and editing, which added distractions and disrupted the learning experience. In contrast, the professionally produced videos the team identified flowed smoothly, incorporating images and animations with scripted dialogue. For the team, this findings highlights the importance of involving online education specialists and video producers for developing future videos.
\n\n\n\nThanks to funding from SSHRC, Lauren is excited for what's next: creating and testing three educational videos on the h-index. \"This was really the background work. Now we're starting to think about how we actually create the video and how we are going to measure what's happening.\"\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBut the road toward making people metrics literate doesn't stop here. All of the Metrics Literacies' resources are open through Zenodo. Lauren envisions that anyone could adopt their approaches and materials, using them to improve literacies about other scholarly metrics. In her words, \"If we care about science itself, and we want science to be sound and ethical, then we really should be very mindful of what we’re doing with our metrics.\"
\n\n\n\nTo stay up to date with the Metrics Literacies project, sign up for the ScholCommLab newsletter. Visit Zenodo to access all of the Metrics Literacies outputs.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/m6qkd-gkq57","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=4037","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/MetricsLiteracies.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1652054400,"rid":"3a647-x4384","summary":"Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index\u2014which is defined as the \" h number of papers with at least h number of citations.\" This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.","tags":["Article Summaries","Research","Metrics Literacies","New Results"],"title":"Becoming Metrics Literate: New Study Examines Videos on the H-index","updated_at":1787975936,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/09/becoming-metrics-literate-new-study-examines-videos-on-the-h-index/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Public Knowledge Project"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Alperin","given":"Juan Pablo","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9344-7439"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the 13th annual EBSI-SIS Information Science Symposium on April 28, 2021.
\n\n\n\nThank you very much for this invitation.
\n\n\n\nBefore I begin, let me begin by acknowledging that I am speaking to you from the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, including the x\u02b7m\u0259\u03b8k\u02b7\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam), Skwxw\u00fa7mesh (Squamish), and s\u0259l\u0313ilw\u0259ta\u0241\u026c t\u0259m\u0259x\u02b7 (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I am incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to live, work, and take in the beauty of these lands on which I am an uninvited guest.
\n\n\n\nI want to continue, by way of introduction, to tell you that it is a real treat to have an opportunity to speak to this distinguished group of library and information science students. You probably don’t know this, but although my work intersects with information science more than any other discipline, I work in a Publishing Studies program, which offers a Masters of Publishing degree that is oriented towards the publishing profession. This means I have very few opportunities to address graduate students who might, perhaps, I hope, be at least slightly interested in my research. The MPub students who I teach get to experience a very different side of me\u2014one that discusses the issues I see with technologies, the Web, and how both of those things affect the content industries. While there are graduate students on my team at the ScholCommLab, it is not quite the same thrill as having a whole crowd of you to address directly.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAnd so, when I accepted to give this address, I decided I would use it to get out of my system the kind of advice that I would have the opportunity to give regularly if I were an Information Science Professor teaching at any of your universities.
\n\n\n\nThat’s why the title of my talk is: “The most innovative methods are sometimes the simplest.” (I admit, that in the interest of drawing you in, I almost omitted the word \"sometimes.”) I could have also titled this presentation: “It is more important to ask a good research question than to have a cool research method.”\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBut, I wanted you to come, so you got the more click-baity title.
\n\n\n\nUnderneath what will be a somewhat lighthearted talk are some serious issues that plague academia\u2014ones that I’d be happy to take questions on at the end\u2014that I will only quickly brush upon here. Each one of these issues could be the basis for a keynote. And each one raises questions that I think about because my subject matter is academic careers and scholarly communication, but also because I faced them myself when I was a graduate student.
\n\n\n\nThese problematic elements of academia draw a terrain through which there are only a few easily identifiable paths to success.
Obviously, we could go into more detail about each of these issues and beyond. But I simply want to point out that these\u2014I would say, problematic\u2014elements of academia draw a terrain through which there are only a few easily identifiable paths to success:
\n\n\n\nWhat I want to do with my remaining time today is walk you through how I have managed to, on multiple occasions, use extremely simple methods to shed light on questions in an innovative way. This has allowed me to not get caught up in the disciplinary struggles, nor to find myself playing the game of cranking out endless meaningless publications. I hope that some parts of this trajectory will resonate with where you are at, and hopefully serve you well as you proceed in your own academic careers.
\n\n\n\nMy academic story begins when I was a doctoral student. I had been working in Latin America and had been trying to better understand Latin American scholarly publishing, which is largely all Open Access. I knew I wanted to do my dissertation on this topic. I had worked with three major regional players who, by combining their resources, provided me with access to a directory of every journal in the region, the metadata of over 1300 journals, the download data of the same journals dating back years, citation data for about half of those journals, and more. I also had the distinct advantage of having a computer science background, so I possessed the computation skills to manipulate and crunch this data, plus the mathematics knowledge to be able to understand\u2014even if I had not yet learned\u2014sophisticated statistical methods.
\n\n\n\nI was doing my PhD in a School of Education, and so my own background and the data I had access to gave me a competitive advantage over many of my Ed School colleagues. It became clear to me that, to \"succeed\" in academia, I should deepen my methodological expertise and further distinguish myself from my peers. So I set about trying to do this:
\n\n\n\nI took a class on network analysis, as well as multiple workshops, and then struggled for weeks to figure out how to run some Erd\u0151s\u2013R\u00e9nyi (Random Graph) models. This approach is the equivalent of using a “normal distribution” in statistics\u2014you can compare your graph and see if it differs from a randomly generated one. I was going to use this to see how national, regional, and international networks behaved.
\n\n\n\nThen I took a class on Natural Language Processing, and I learned how to do topic modelling\u2014labelled and unlabelled, supervised and unsupervised, etc. I learned a whole complicated suite of methods for figuring out what articles clustered with each other, all to see if I could figure out if Latin American scholarship was engaging more with itself than with scholarship from beyond.
\n\n\n\nMy point is this: I had a unique dataset and a massively understudied problem space, so almost any question I wanted to tackle could have produced valuable insights. I struggled, until I realized that what I really wanted to know was who was using this research. I kept trying to find a clever statistical, computational, or quasi-experimental way of answering the question: “Who uses this stuff?”
\n\n\n\nUntil I realized the solution: JUST ASK THEM.
\n\n\n\nOK, at this point, you might say: \"But this particular solution only worked because you had access to the portals.\"
\n\n\n\nWhile that may be true, I came across the same problem when I was trying to make the argument that social media could allow members of the public to access research. It was the earliest days of what are now known as Altmetrics, and lots of folks had been trying to answer the question: \"Can we know whether the public reads research by looking at social media?” I had just come off the high of doing this super simple pop-up survey, so I thought: How can I replicate this? Say \"hello\" to the creation of Twitter-Bot Surveys.
\n\n\n\nFor those of you who fall more on the library side and are interested in documents and textual corpora, the same sort of approach can apply beyond social media. The conversations about the various issues I outlined earlier\u2014those issues about the need for many publications, the rising importance of metrics, etc\u2014all seemed to come back to the incentive structures in academia. The argument I kept hearing was that faculty wanted to do things differently, but review, tenure, and promotion (RPT) committees kept evaluating people in this way. We even saw a proposal to run an advocacy campaign to “change the form” of the RPT process\u2014all based on no evidence.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, our team came up with what was, again, a pretty simple method to determine whether this argument actually reflected reality: we collected documents related to the Review, Promotion, and Tenure process. How? We just emailed people and asked them for them! Obviously, we did some planning around sample sizes, etc. But the plan was simple: collect documents and then check whether the terms of interest were present in the texts or not. Again, this method is not complicated. Instead, what is innovative here is the use of a simple method to answer an important question.
\n\n\n\nThis is what I want to emphasize: although I have accidentally become one of those scholars who is known for innovative methods, I really don’t think any of these are innovative at all. There are some really clever studies out there using really clever methods, but, in most of my work, I don’t think the methods are innovative or sophisticated at all. Pop-up surveys already existed at the time I used them, as did twitter bots, and checking the presence of specific terms in a collection of documents is about as simple an analysis as you can imagine. What has made these papers and studies successful? Why do I\u2014and, I think, others\u2014consider them to be so interesting?
\n\n\n\nThey ask questions that people\u2014and not just a select few\u2014really want to know the answers to. I really cared about the “so-what” during all of these research projects. When you do that, it frees you from the pressure to get a perfect answer. If the answer is important, having a complete answer is not essential. That is, instead of trying to answer a boring question in a clever way, it is better to answer an interesting question in a boring way.
\n\n\n\nIf the answer is important, having a complete answer is not essential. That is, instead of trying to answer a boring question in a clever way, it is better to answer an interesting question in a boring way.
Ask a good question and look for a “good enough” way to approximate an answer. If your question is good enough, a perfect answer is not necessary.
\n\n\n\nI want to go back to the earliest example I gave\u2014the one about who was reading Latin American scholarship. Did my method control for all demographics? No. Could I have tried to get multiple answers and link them together to form a more complete picture of the users of Latin American research? Yes. What about linking those answers to Erd\u0151s\u2013R\u00e9nyi models? Sure! You could do that. But, at the end of the day, the most compelling thing to come out of my PhD was the answer to a pop-up question: “I am interested in this research article for my personal use.” This view was expressed by 25% of respondents.
\n\n\n\nIt was incomplete, it was imperfect, but, as it turned out, it was also an innovative way to very simply answer a question that everyone in the Open Access movement cared about.
\n\n\n\nBy all means, come up with clever studies, think through all the interesting angles you can, make your research as robust as possible… But my advice is to first spend time thinking about what question you really care about and why.
By all means, come up with clever studies, think through all the interesting angles you can, make your research as robust as possible. Do high quality work. This is all absolutely essential. But my advice is to first spend time thinking about what question you really care about and why. Only after you are clear on that question should you figure out how innovative your method needs to be. It might turn out that, just as with the examples I’ve shown you today, often the most innovative thing you can do is to answer your question as simply as possible.
\n\n\n\nThank you.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/jp825-qn911","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3607","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2.-esbi-juan-at-work.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1619740800,"rid":"trs77-7aa59","summary":" Keynote presented by Juan Pablo Alperin at the 13th annual EBSI-SIS Information Science Symposium on April 28, 2021. Thank you very much for this invitation. Before I begin, let me begin by acknowledging that I am speaking to you from the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, including the x\u02b7m\u0259\u03b8k\u02b7\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam), Skwxw\u00fa7mesh (Squamish), and s\u0259l\u0313ilw\u0259ta\u0241\u026c t\u0259m\u0259x\u02b7 (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.","tags":["Keynotes","Events","Latin America","Open Access","Scholarly Communication"],"title":"Keynote talk: The most innovative methods are sometimes the simplest","updated_at":1787976069,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/04/30/keynote-talk-the-most-innovative-methods-are-sometimes-the-simplest/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nThis week's post features Kathleen Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher exploring data citation practices\u2014and the newest member of the ScholCommLab. In this interview, she shares her biggest questions about how researchers use data and offers one simple tip to help with everything from paper writing to home decorating.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am a postdoctoral researcher working (remotely from the Netherlands) on the Meaningful Data Counts project with Stefanie Haustein, Isabella Peters, and Anton Ninkov.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nOur project maps out current practices of data sharing, data reuse, and data citation across disciplines. I am especially excited about digging into the 'why' behind these practices: Why do researchers cite (or not cite) data? Which 'data uses' are not cited? How does this all relate to how researchers cite other things\u2014like academic literature? Which patterns exist across and within disciplinary fields, data types, research topics…? I could go on, but I will stop there.
\n\n\n\nI am very proud of my doctoral dissertation, which was awarded a cum laude designation that is not often given out in the Netherlands. It is both exciting and a bit strange to have four rewarding, yet exhausting, years of my life packaged neatly into a book.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am also excited about a book chapter that I am working on with Sally Wyatt, Paul Groth, and Andrea Scharnhorst on interdisciplinarity. The chapter looks at how conflicting ideas about a common concept (in this case, 'users' and 'uses' of technology) can provide common ground in interdisciplinary research.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nCan I list two?
\n\n\n\nWhenever I was trying to decide to go for something (e.g. a new job, trying something new in school), my mom would say: \"Does it hurt you or someone else? If not, it is probably an opportunity.\" On the whole this has been good advice, but it has also been a bit of a double-edged sword as I sometimes end up with too many \"opportunities.\"
\n\n\n\nMy second piece of advice comes from Thoreau: \"Simplify, simplify, simplify.\" This helps to counter the problem of too many opportunities. It is also helpful in writing academic papers and home decorating.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nFind out more about Kathleen on her website or follow her on Twitter at @gregory_km.\u00a0
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fcb02-8jp78","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3636","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Three-Questions-With-Kathleen.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1620172800,"rid":"283y9-dz268","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. This week's post features Kathleen Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher exploring data citation practices\u2014and the newest member of the ScholCommLab. In this interview, she shares her biggest questions about how researchers use data and offers one simple tip to help with everything from paper writing to home decorating.","tags":["3Qs","MDC Project","Open Data","Postdoctoral Fellows"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Kathleen!","updated_at":1787976053,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/05/05/three-questions-with-kathleen/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nOur latest post features Mario Mali\u010dki, a former visiting scholar and ongoing collaborator at the ScholCommLab. Currently working as a postdoc at METRICS Stanford University, Mario is also a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review. In this post, he reflects on some of the proudest moments of his career and shares why he's most excited about the moments yet to come.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nJoseph Costello, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lauren Maggio, and I recently finished an analysis of single comments left for bioRxiv preprints. And I have recently proposed a template for peer review which I will improve based on the feedback from the lab. It is my hope that such a template will help both young and established researchers be more honest in acknowledging and understanding their scholarly strengths, and how they can best help those whose papers they review. The template is supposed to support researchers in conducting and writing their review reports, and help them focus on essential items they should try to address.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am moving in the mid-career researcher stage and have been recently reflecting on the 30+ papers I have co-authored in my lifetime. I remember the pride I felt the first time I designed and wrote a full study from scratch that did not involve my PhD mentors. I also remember the sense of accomplishment I experienced when I finally finalized a project on duplicate publications after five years of work, as well as the satisfaction of posting my last preprint that dealt with preprint server policies and research integrity. Lately, however, I am most proud that I have realized what I want to focus on in the next period of my career: increasing the transparency of peer review. I believe it's time we start making it clear when peer review predominantly provides a seal of approval for a study well done vs when it greatly improves the study's reporting, analysis, or interpretation of results.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nI am moving in the mid-career researcher stage and have been recently reflecting on the 30+ papers I have co-authored in my lifetime… I have realized what I want to focus on in the next period of my career: increasing the transparency of peer review.
My mum worked as a nurse, so there is a trifecta of advice I always think of when someone asks about advice I've received. Although I remember them in series, I cannot be sure she offered these words of advice one after the other\u2014maybe they just accumulated in my mind over time. The first one was to never use fireworks (as she would treat so many kids who had been badly hurt by them), the second was to use protection (as you don't want to regret your choices), and the third was to live with someone for at least a year before you marry them.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nThe worst advice (I got this twice actually) was that I should back down on my principles if I wanted to more easily advance in academia and not offend senior or emeritus professors. Even though I didn't take the advice, I am glad those words were spoken to me, as they made me realize under which conditions and with whom I want to continue working as a researcher.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nFind Mario on Twitter at @Mario_Malicki
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/817s8-rgh50","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3662","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Three-Questions-With-Mario.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1620777600,"rid":"2t9vt-7h840","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. Our latest post features Mario Mali\u010dki, a former visiting scholar and ongoing collaborator at the ScholCommLab.","tags":["3Qs","Peer Review","Preprints","Visiting Scholar Program"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Mario!","updated_at":1787976039,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/05/12/three-questions-with-mario/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Six years ago, Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein sat down at a bar in Amsterdam after a full day of participating in a conference. They came for a drink and an opportunity to connect over shared interests, but they left with an ambitious plan that would change both of their careers. On the backs of beer napkins, a project aimed at understanding the societal impact of research with the help of altmetrics started to take shape. The gin-and-tonic-inspired grant was successful, and, with that project, the ScholCommLab was born.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAt the time, Juan was a newly minted Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University and Stefanie was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal. More than half a decade after embarking on that first journey together, the two lab co-directors are celebrating a second career-defining moment: tenure.
\n\n\n\n\"Being tenured is a huge milestone,\" says Stefanie, who became an Associate Professor at University of Ottawa, School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) on May 1, 2021. \"I felt so much excitement and relief when I received the (anonymized) letters of the external reviewers\u2014they were extremely generous and kind.\"\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"It is great to be unencumbered from expectations and from any sense of having to prove myself,\" agrees Juan, an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University's Publishing Program as of September 1. \"That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.\"
\n\n\n\n\"That feeling of freedom manifests itself whenever I decide to accept or turn down an invitation or opportunity. In the last few months, I have always been more certain that if I say yes or no, it is because of my own interests, and not out of a sense of what I should be doing.\"
Juan Pablo Alperin
The two co-directors celebrate this milestone from a place of transition\u2014Stefanie returning from maternity leave, Juan preparing for his first sabbatical. Both look forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues and continuing the work that has brought them to this moment.
\n\n\n\n\"I am excited to continue working on existing grants on data citations (funded by Sloan) and metrics literacies (funded by SSHRC) and one on open science practices that we recently received from the Wellcome Trust,\" Stefanie says. \"But what I am most excited about is seeing the Ottawa team and students face to face again\u2014it's been way too long and I miss everyone!\"
\n\n\n\n\"I am using this opportunity to reconnect with my colleagues in Latin America,\" Juan explains. \"There is a lot of interest in the region to develop Open Science policy, and so I have been reaching out to everyone I know to see how I can be most helpful.\" He's also been applying for several major grants, with the hope of returning from sabbatical to a very active lab.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nWhile both are grateful to start this next chapter of their careers, neither expects that their new title will change the nature of their work.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"I've never been a really strategic person, so my research has always focused on what I am most interested in rather than what looks good on my CV,\" Stefanie explains. \"I don't anticipate that having tenure will actually influence how I work or what I work on.\"
\n\n\n\n\"I became a tenured professor doing the things I love, not doing what others wanted me to do,\" Juan explains. For him, the key to tenure was \"to think about it enough to make sure I participated in and accomplished the things I wanted to showcase to the committee, but not enough that I lost sight of myself while trying to tick boxes.\" He adds that, to get tenure, \"You want to do you.\"
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/zy45r-1q406","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3690","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/stef-juan-ottawa-scaled.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1630972800,"rid":"7mp6h-9xm33","summary":"Six years ago, Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein sat down at a bar in Amsterdam after a full day of participating in a conference. They came for a drink and an opportunity to connect over shared interests, but they left with an ambitious plan that would change both of their careers. On the backs of beer napkins, a project aimed at understanding the societal impact of research with the help of altmetrics started to take shape.","tags":["News","People","RPT"],"title":"Double tenure: ScholCommLab co-directors celebrate a career milestone together","updated_at":1787976024,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2021/09/07/double-tenure/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"From data sharing mandates to clinical trial registration, Open Science (OS) policies for biomedical research are in no short supply. But ensuring those policies become real-world practices can be a challenge\u2014particularly when there's no simple way to measure success. Launched in Fall 2021, the Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project hopes to overcome this barrier by helping research organizations track the use of the OS practices that matter most to their communities.
\n\n\n\n\"The reality is that just creating a policy for an open science practice isn’t sufficient in terms of its actual implementation,\" explains Kelly Cobey, a Scientist at University of Ottawa Heart Institute and primary investigator on the project. \"A policy is only as good as the adherence to it, so we want to make sure that we have a way for organizations to actually monitor that compliance.\"
\n\n\n\nThe Wellcome-funded project is a collaboration involving 80 researchers and stakeholder participants from 20 institutions around the world. It is led by an international team of researchers that includes ScholCommLab co-directors Stefanie Haustein and Juan Pablo Alperin, as well as leading scholars such as David Moher, Cameron Neylon, Emily Sena, Justin Presseau, Lars Hemkens, Rodrigo Costas, Thed van Leeuwen, Ulrich Dirnagl, and Daniel Strech. The project takes a novel approach that is part research, part action. The goal is to create a community-informed automatic dashboard that will allow institutions to track how consistently members are using recommended OS practices. Beyond measuring progress, the dashboard could be used to identify areas in which more support or training is needed.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"Right now it seems like funders or policymakers come up with a policy and then tell institutions: 'Okay, you have to do this now.' Then institutions say: 'Okay, researchers, you have to do this now.' But the researchers are left in a situation where they may not be aware of why or how to comply with the OS practice and may not feel supported,\" Cobey explains, \"No one coaches them through it. That’s why you see the gap between policy and implementation.\"
\n\n\n\nThe project builds on the foundations laid out by Charit\u00e9's custom OS dashboard and Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative's (COKI) open access (OA) dashboard. It will monitor a range of OS practices, much like the Charit\u00e9 dashboard, but will be developed, tested, and refined to reflect those practices that are seen as most valuable to stakeholders at biomedical institutions across the world. It's being created by the community, for the community.\u00a0
\n\n\n\n\"A lot of times people just get an idea and make a prototype, but after investing all that time and money and funding, they find that the tool doesn’t resonate with the community,\" Cobey says, \"We’re trying to circumvent that by involving them in the process and the user-design.\"
\n\n\n\nTo identify the OS practices that should be included in the final dashboard, the project employs what Cobey calls an “integrated knowledge mobilization” approach. This includes using the Delphi survey method, which allows researchers to iteratively gather and integrate feedback from stakeholders throughout the research and prototyping process. This process involves a cycle of surveying stakeholders, synthesizing key findings and presenting them to participants, gathering feedback, and finally integrating that feedback into the next set of survey questions. The Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project team is currently knee-deep in the survey cycle, but hopes to publish a preprint of the final results in summer 2022.
\n\n\n\nTo ensure the final dashboard is useful across multiple biomedical research contexts, Delphi participants were recruited to support broad representation of geographies, genders, and career stages. Cobey says that the diversity of participating stakeholders has already yielded important insights. \"It’s been really eye opening,\" she says, \"you have all these people with good intentions thinking about public accessibility, but not every intention is feasible in every local context.\"
\n\n\n\nTake, for example, the question of whether to include Open Access (OA) publishing in the dashboard. While OA compliance seemed like an obvious activity to include, Cobey says deciding on the right metric to track was complicated by international differences in policies and resources. In line with the recommendations laid out in Plan S, many European participants indicated in round 1 and 2 surveys that they wanted to track Gold OA (i.e., publication of articles in openly available journals). But scholars from regions with different OA policies, such as Nigeria and Latin America, felt that this would be inequitable. In biomedicine, publishing Gold OA typically requires researchers to pay high Article Processing Charges (APCs), which can be inaccessible for scholars with fewer resources. Scholars from these regions made it clear that they would not want to be benchmarked against the European standard.
\n\n\n\n\"Had I, from here in Canada, just come up with a metric, I might not have had that perspective,\" Cobey reflects. \"That’s why I think it’s so important to have a diversity of views.\"
\n\n\n\n\"As researchers and research institutions, there’s the responsibility to maintain these best practices. We're excited to provide a tool that makes that responsibility a little bit easier.\"
Kelly Cobey
It's still early days for the project, and there's lots of work to be done. But Cobey is hopeful about what lies ahead. \"We know that Open Science practices can increase the usability of research, support reproducibility, and reduce bias\" she says. \"At the end of the day, if we don’t publish our results, or we report them in a way that’s biased, it’s unethical. As researchers and research institutions, there’s the responsibility to maintain these best practices. We're excited to provide a tool that makes that responsibility a little bit easier.\"
\n\n\n\nTo stay up to date with the Biomedical Research OS Dashboard project, sign up for the ScholCommLab newsletter.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a83j5-b6d16","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3805","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OS-dashboard-feature.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1646179200,"rid":"2r8mk-ztg54","summary":"From data sharing mandates to clinical trial registration, Open Science (OS) policies for biomedical research are in no short supply. But ensuring those policies become real-world practices can be a challenge\u2014particularly when there's no simple way to measure success.","tags":["Research","Grants","Metrics","Open Access","Open Data"],"title":"Turning policy into practice: The Biomedical Research Open Science Dashboard project","updated_at":1787976010,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/03/02/turning-policy-into-practice-the-biomedical-research-open-science-dashboard-project/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"ScholCommLab"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nOur latest post features Olivia Aguiar, a lab manager at the ScholCommLab and a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University's Injury Prevention and Mobility Lab (IPML). In this Q&A, she tells us about creating science comics, interviewing “super seniors,” setting boundaries, and more.
\n\n\n\nI'm so excited to be joining the ScholCommLab as a Lab Manager. My tasks include coordinating lab and project team meetings; updating the blog, website, and newsletter; collaborating on grant proposals; and supporting the lab directors in communication and outreach. I look forward to meeting the entire team and embarking on this new journey!
\n\n\n\nI recently completed my certificate in Biomedical Visualization and Communication (BMVC) at The University of British Columbia. During the program, I learned that I love to illustrate scientific and health comics. Currently, I’m working on a short comic about concussions in ice hockey. My goal is to finish the final version by the end of Summer 2022. Stay tuned on social media (@livsaguiar) to see the result!
\n\n\n\nI interviewed \"Super Seniors\"\u2014individuals aged 85 years or older who have never been diagnosed with a major medical concern (e.g. heart disease, cancer, dementia)\u2014for the Healthy Aging Study at BC Cancer. My colleague and I summarized their advice on how to live a long, healthy life. My personal favourites include: \"Kindness doesn't cost anything,\" \"Consider life as an adventure,\" and \"Do good for others but also look after yourself.\" Their words provide me with perspective and inspiration\u2014especially during uncertain and challenging times.
\n\n\n\nAs for professional advice, the best and worst I’ve received: \"If you want something done right, do it yourself.\" This mantra got me through university. It helped me build resilience, solve problems, and achieve success in volunteer and leadership positions. But this advice also led to many, many bouts of stress and burnout. I learned (the hard way) that sometimes there is a better person for the job. Now, I know there is a difference between pushing out of your comfort zone and pushing beyond your limits. I embrace team work and collaboration in the classroom and work place. It is brave to ask for help!
\n\n\n\nFind Olivia on Twitter at @livsaguiar
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/k7ts4-4wm50","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3888","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Three-Questions-With-Olivia-Aguiar.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1649808000,"rid":"nvrmm-z6r05","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. Our latest post features Olivia Aguiar, a lab manager at the ScholCommLab and a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University's Injury Prevention and Mobility Lab (IPML). In this Q&A, she tells us about creating science comics, interviewing \"super seniors,\" setting boundaries, and more.","tags":["3Qs","Health Communication","Science Communication"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Olivia!","updated_at":1787975995,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/04/13/three-questions-with-olivia/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fleerackers","given":"Alice","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7182-4061"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"\"Denying a professor tenure, Harvard sparks a debate over ethnic studies,\" reads a New York Times story published in January 2020. \"After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she is seeking justice,\" a more recent headline proclaims. \"Academic tenure: In desperate need of reform or of defenders?\" asks another.
\n\n\n\nThese headlines offer a taste of the debate that has played out about academic review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process over the last two years. In the wake of several high-profile cases\u2014most of which involve women or BIPOC scholars who were denied tenure without any clear cause\u2014institutions are under pressure to reevaluate the way in which they make decisions about who gets to stay \"in\" and who is ultimately pushed out. At the heart of this reckoning are questions about the hidden, implicit values and biases that shape the nature of RPT decisions. In the system that ultimately has the final say about faculty careers, these factors are too often left unsaid.
\n\n\n\nOver the past 5 years, the ScholCommLab has worked to shed light on these factors and build critical understanding of the nature of the RPT process. Through a series of mixed-method studies, the research team analyzed RPT documents and surveyed scholars from 129 institutions across Canada and the US. Their work has already shed light on many problematic aspects of the RPT process, including an overreliance on flawed metrics, an undervaluation of public forms of scholarship, and unclear and circular definitions of important terms like \"impact\" and \"prestige.\"
\n\n\n\nNow, in its sixth and final study, the research team has turned its attention to another controversial aspect of the RPT process: collegiality.
\n\n\n\n\"Collegiality can be a bit of a double-edged sword,\" explains DeDe Dawson, an Associate Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan and lead author of the new study. \"It is difficult to assess fairly because it is amorphous and subjective in nature, but if it is not defined it has the potential to be misused to enforce homogeneity, stifle dissent, or as a cover for discrimination.\"
\n\n\n\nPeople define the term \"collegiality\" differently, but at its most basic level, it relates to the quality of relationships. In academic contexts, it's usually used to describe the ways in which faculty members interact, collaborate, and share responsibilities with each other. Whether collegiality should be formally included in RPT processes is an ongoing controversy that has intensified following the recent high-profile tenure-denial cases. Even when collegiality is not formally included in the RPT process, however, survey data suggests that faculty members consider it to be a factor shaping the RPT decisions at their institutions.
\n\n\n\nTo better understand this apparent contradiction, DeDe worked with Esteban Morales, Erin McKiernan, Lesley Schimanski, Meredith Niles, and Juan Pablo Alperin to examine whether and how \"collegiality\" featured in a sample of more than 850 RPT documents. The results, published April 6th in PLOS ONE, suggest that collegiality and related terms do appear in at least some RPT documents, particularly those at research-focused universities. When these terms are mentioned, however, the team found that the descriptions tend to be brief at best, providing little information about what \"collegiality\" actually means or how it would be formally assessed.
\n\n\n\nFor DeDe, the lack of clarity surrounding collegiality is concerning: \"If this term is left undefined, it could be weaponized to punish those who don't 'fit in,'\" she says. \"It opens it up to be an informal criterion for excluding people based on personal biases.\"
\n\n\n\nBut while the findings are bleak, DeDe is not. \"I hope our results will motivate departments to begin discussing how best to handle these situations in their own RPT documents and processes,\" she says. \"Individual faculty members also have a role to play: call out the biases you see playing out on tenure committees. Suggest changes to your RPT standards to recognize and reward collegial behaviours. Work with your colleagues to ensure your department's RPT documents include clear, equitable reflections of what you value.\"
\n\n\n\nWant to learn more about the RPT project? Read the full study at PLOS ONE or visit the ScholCommLab website to learn more about the RPT project.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/z8waj-z7m94","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3978","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Image1.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1650844800,"rid":"3qg03-4jx80","summary":"\"Denying a professor tenure, Harvard sparks a debate over ethnic studies,\" reads a New York Times story published in January 2020. \"After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she is seeking justice,\" a more recent headline proclaims. \"Academic tenure: In desperate need of reform or of defenders?\" asks another.","tags":["Preliminary Findings","Research","New Results","Research Institutions","RPT"],"title":"Not \"collegial\" enough: New study examines unsaid criteria in the tenure process","updated_at":1787975981,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/04/25/not-collegial-enough-new-study-examines-unsaid-criteria-in-the-tenure-process/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.
\n\n\n\nThis week’s post features Fatou Bah, a master’s student in the School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) at the University of Ottawa (UOttawa), Data Support Specialist in\u00a0Research Data Management\u00a0at the UOttawa Library, and research assistant at the ScholCommLab. She tells us about her work in cognitive accessibility, taking her own advice, and more.
\n\n\n\nI just joined the lab and will be working on my master's thesis with Stefanie Haustein. My research background is in cognitive accessibility\u2014helping people of all cognitive abilities process information. I believe everyone should have access to information regardless of their disability status. My research focuses on how database accessibility impacts the search behaviour of academics with cognitive disabilities. This is especially important for individuals working and studying in higher education, where searching through databases is critical to completing their work.
\n\n\n\nI recently had the opportunity to guest lecture, which was exciting. It was for an ethics and social responsibility course. I discussed how technology supports cognitive function and the barriers to adopting this technology (e.g., lack of cognitive accessibility). I also talked about how persons with cognitive disabilities are at higher risk of privacy threats. Caution needs to be exercised when developing technologies for this population.
\n\n\n\nThat's a tough one. I can't recall any instance where someone has given me advice on something or where I asked for someone's advice. If someone has, clearly I haven't taken it.
\n\n\n\nFind Fatou on Twitter at @Fatou_Bah1.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/7faah-hyf74","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=3963","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Three-Questions-With-Fatou.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1651536000,"rid":"ntg3x-y7j59","summary":"Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we're profiling each of our members and the amazing work they're doing. This week's post features Fatou Bah, a master's student in the School of Information Studies (\u00c9SIS) at the University of Ottawa (UOttawa), Data Support Specialist in Research Data Management at the UOttawa Library, and research assistant at the ScholCommLab.","tags":["3Qs","Altmetrics","Open Data"],"title":"Three questions with\u2026 Fatou!","updated_at":1787975966,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/03/three-questions-with-fatou/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBetween 2017 and 2022, we conducted a multi-year research project involving the collection and analysis of more than 850 RPT guidelines and 338 surveys with scholars from 129 research institutions across Canada and the US. Starting with a literature review of academic promotion and tenure processes, we launched six studies applying mixed methods approaches such as surveys and matrix coding.
\n\n\n\nSo how do today’s universities and colleges incentivize open access research? Read on for 6 key takeaways from our studies.
\n\n\n\nIn a study published in eLife in 2019, we assessed the degree to which RPT documents included guidelines specific to open access, open data, and open education.
\n\n\n\nWe found that while institutions want faculty to engage in public outreach, there are no explicit incentives or structures to assess contributions to public scholarship. Faculty were rewarded for traditional research outputs and citations. \"Public\" and \"Community\" are terms often mentioned in RPT documents, yet outputs of public scholarship were viewed as service contributions\u2014not research. Only 5% of institutions mentioned \"Open Access\" in their RPT documents.
\n\n\n\nSo if there were no incentives for public scholarship, what kinds of outputs were mentioned in the RPT guidelines? In this book chapter for the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management (2020), we explored how non-traditional outputs are assessed in promotion and tenure.
\n\n\n\nAround 95% of institutions mentioned traditional outputs such as journal articles and book chapters. A diversity of research outputs, such as open data sets, software, or works in progress, were found in RPT documents extending across institution types and disciplines. While research activities are beginning to be recognized more broadly, our findings suggest that current structures of faculty assessment have yet to recognize the value of non-traditional scholarly outputs.
\n\n\n\nIn this study (published in PLOS in 2021), we wanted to know how faculty define common research terms used in RPT documents.
\n\n\n\nWe found that faculty often defined “quality,” “impact,” and “prestige\" in circular and overlapping ways. Researchers and their colleagues applied their own\u2014and often different\u2014understanding of these terms. Interestingly, the varying definitions did not relate to age, gender, or academic discipline. Our findings suggest that we can't rely on these ill-defined and highly subjective terms for evaluation.
\n\n\n\nIn a study published in e-Life in 2019, explored the use of Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in RPT documents. We analyzed how faculty defined and mentioned this controversial metric.
\n\n\n\nWe found that only 23% of institutions mentioned \"impact factor\" explicitly in the RPT documents. While this may seem low, there were over a dozen terms used that faculty may associate with JIF without stating it explicitly, including: \"prestigious journal,\" \"leading journal,\" and \"top journal.\" Despite little to no evidence that JIF is a valid measure of research quality, there is still pressure to publish in high-JIF venues, which limits the adoption of open access publishing.
\n\n\n\nIn another publication (published in PLOS in 2020), we examined what drives faculty to publish where they publish. The results were surprising.
\n\n\n\nWhile faculty prioritize readership when submitting their work for publication, they believe their peers are driven by journal prestige and metrics (such as impact factor). Next to readership, faculty cared about journal prestige and journals which their peers read. As for the RPT process, faculty thought they would be evaluated based on publication quantity and prestige\u2014but this perception varied across age, career stage, and institution type.
\n\n\n\nIn our sixth\u2014and final\u2014publication (published this year in PLOS), we explored whether and how \"collegiality\" is used in the RPT process.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nWhile \"collegiality\" was hardly ever defined in RPT documents, faculty we surveyed said that it plays an important role in the tenure process. Faculty from research-intensive universities were more likely to perceive collegiality as a factor in their RPT processes. Our results suggest that clear policy on \"collegiality\" is needed to avoid punishing those who don't “fit in.”
\n\n\n\nSince starting this project more than 5 years ago, our papers, blog posts, and tweets have been viewed and shared thousands of times. They've been covered in more than 15 news stories and blog posts, including in Nature, Science, and Times Higher Education. We're hopeful that this wide visibility is a first step towards reimagining the RPT process so that it better reflects the types of scholarship that faculty members themselves want to see in the world.
\n\n\n\nSo where do we go from here?
\n\n\n\nIn all of our papers, the overarching conclusion is the same: There’s room for values-based assessments in the RPT process. We need to move away from measuring outputs or judging faculty by ill-defined concepts and move towards rewarding the values, processes, and ways in which people work. As we bring the RPT project to a close, we'd like to highlight two initiatives that have started to pave the way:
\n\n\n\n1. The Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative generates and supports values-based approaches for scholarly life including review, promotion, and tenure. Their paper, Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy, offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to improve and strengthen the impact of all scholarly work. It features work by our lab, challenges academics to reform and rethink the RPT process, and suggests ways to align faculty expectations with institutional values. We invite you to read HuMetricsHSS' work and reflect on the values that you would like to see considered in your institution's RPT process.
\n\n\n\n2. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a worldwide initiative recognizing the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. They offer recommendations, resources, and case studies on best practices for research assessment. We encourage you and your institution to read, sign, and adopt DORA, to improve the evaluation of scholarly output.
\n\n\n\nFinally, we hope this work inspires you to reflect on your own role in upholding the status quo in the RPT process\u2014and the power you have to change it. As Juan Pablo Alperin says \"I invite you to begin a conversation by sharing with your colleague why access to research matters. Because it does.\" By sharing our values and thoughts on the RPT process, we can cultivate an academic culture that rethinks research assessment for the greater good.
\n\n\n\nWe would like to thank and acknowledge the team behind the RPT project which includes: Erin McKiernan, Meredith Niles, Lesley Schimanski, Carol Mu\u00f1oz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Michelle La, Esteban Morales, Diane (DeDe) Dawson. Without your contributions, this work would not have been possible!
\n\n\n\nFor more about the review, promotion, and tenure project, check out the project website, visual overview, blog posts, and media coverage.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/b75m0-2y502","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=4011","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Infographic-1-RPT-Research-Project-Overview-Full-Resolution.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1651622400,"rid":"5s3zz-pjk72","summary":"The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research.","tags":["Article Summaries","Research","New Results","Research Institutions","RPT"],"title":"Rethinking Research Assessment for the Greater Good: Findings from the RPT Project","updated_at":1787975951,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/04/findings-from-the-rpt-project/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0213rcc28","name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aguiar","given":"Olivia","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-9049"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1783172158,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index\u2014which is defined as the \"h number of papers with at least h number of citations.\" This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.
\n\n\n\nAlthough simple, the h-index is flawed and often applied inappropriately. It’s been criticized due to inconsistencies, lack of field normalization, database-dependence, and time-dependence. Yet the h-index continues to be used for hiring, review, and tenure.
\n\n\n\nLauren Maggio, professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, has witnessed how academics misuse metrics in high-stakes decisions. Across her career, sitting on many hiring committees, she has \"unfortunately seen candidates compared in relation to their h-index,\" despite its shortcomings.
\n\n\n\n\"It's really important that people understand how these metrics are created, that they understand some of the biases and issues that are baked into these metrics that may disadvantage some groups,\" she says. In this post, Lauren tells us about the ScholCommLab's recent work characterizing available educational videos on the h-index.
\n\n\n\n\"It's really important that people understand how these metrics are created, that they understand some of the biases and issues that are baked into these metrics that may disadvantage some groups.\"
Lauren Maggio
The project, led by Stefanie Haustein, co-director of the ScholCommLab, aims to improve the appropriate use of scholarly metrics in academia. The team is developing educational videos and evaluating their efficiency in a randomized controlled trial to teach academics \"Metrics Literacies,\" the skills and knowledge to recognize, interpret, critically assess, and effectively and ethically use scholarly metrics.
\n\n\n\nThe multidisciplinary team consists of bibliometric experts, video producers, and online education specialists, including Lauren. \"Stefanie asked me to jump on this because of some of the work I've been doing in the medical education space,\" she says. They decided to start by developing open educational resources about the infamous h-index.
\n\n\n\nBefore making their own content, the team assessed the landscape of existing educational videos on the h-index. By understanding available resources, Lauren believes that they could \"get a sense of how people were actually talking about the h-index, what it is, issues with it\" to identify content for their own future initiatives. \"We could find good things to do for our own videos or bad things that we knew we wanted to avoid,\" she added.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn their first study, recently published in PLOS ONE, the Metrics Literacies team examined the characteristics of available educational videos on the h-index. They identified more than 247 videos to get a sense of how the h-index is described and presented. \"We watched a ton of YouTube,\" laughed Lauren.
\n\n\n\nOnly 31 videos met the inclusion criteria (English-speaking, less than 10 mins long, and actually about the h-index). At least two of the authors independently coded each of the videos based on their content, presentation style, and educational quality.
\n\n\n\nSpecifically, the team used Cognitive Load Theory\u2014an instructional theory to guide educational design\u2014to evaluate whether the video format actually helped people learn. Based on this theory, ideal educational videos should be designed to balance three types of cognitive load:
\n\n\n\nTheir results suggest that when it comes to building literacies about the h-index, the scholarly community has a long way to go.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nMost of the videos used elements to balance cognitive load. 90% of videos used signaling (or cues highlighting important details) and 71% used dual channel approaches (like animated text with voice-over explanations) to enhance cognitive processing and reduce germane load. 42% of videos actually addressed the viewer, reducing extraneous load.
\n\n\n\nInterestingly, only one video included an interactive learning element. 97% of videos did not pause to ask a question, pose a reflection, or attempt a calculation\u2014which are tools that can facilitate the learning process. The lack of interaction in the videos could be due to the nature of the medium, but Lauren believes \"It is possible to do those things. They just weren't taking advantage of that.\"
\n\n\n\nThe research also made it clear that there is lots of room for when it comes to minimizing distractions unrelated to learning. 55% of video included non-productive distractions, which increases extraneous load. Lauren found the distractions to be extreme in several of the videos. \"You could hear birds, pretty loud, that would just really distract you, or they would be doing a screencast and just be moving their mouse everywhere,\" she recalls. She recommends that future initiatives should try to be more mindful of reducing these extraneous elements.
\n\n\n\nWhile most videos defined or calculated the h-index, 48% of videos did not mention any caveats. There were no mentions of disadvantages to early career researchers (77%), database differences (71%), or disciplinary differences (61%). In fact, Lauren saw that \"There were presenters very much proposing and helping viewers to think about how to boost their h-index, which shouldn't really have been a surprise.\" The lack of critical reflection in the videos fails to provide transparency on the shortcomings of the h-index.
\n\n\n\n68% of the videos displayed amateurish production quality. These videos had poor camera angles, audio quality, and editing, which added distractions and disrupted the learning experience. In contrast, the professionally produced videos the team identified flowed smoothly, incorporating images and animations with scripted dialogue. For the team, this findings highlights the importance of involving online education specialists and video producers for developing future videos.
\n\n\n\nThanks to funding from SSHRC, Lauren is excited for what's next: creating and testing three educational videos on the h-index. \"This was really the background work. Now we're starting to think about how we actually create the video and how we are going to measure what's happening.\"\u00a0
\n\n\n\nBut the road toward making people metrics literate doesn't stop here. All of the Metrics Literacies' resources are open through Zenodo. Lauren envisions that anyone could adopt their approaches and materials, using them to improve literacies about other scholarly metrics. In her words, \"If we care about science itself, and we want science to be sound and ethical, then we really should be very mindful of what we’re doing with our metrics.\"
\n\n\n\nTo stay up to date with the Metrics Literacies project, sign up for the ScholCommLab newsletter. Visit Zenodo to access all of the Metrics Literacies outputs.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/m6qkd-gkq57","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=4037","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/MetricsLiteracies.jpeg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1652054400,"rid":"3a647-x4384","summary":"Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index\u2014which is defined as the \" h number of papers with at least h number of citations.\" This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.","tags":["Article Summaries","Research","Metrics Literacies","New Results"],"title":"Becoming Metrics Literate: New Study Examines Videos on the H-index","updated_at":1787975936,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2022/05/09/becoming-metrics-literate-new-study-examines-videos-on-the-h-index/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":54739,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":54739}