Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

OpenAlex is increasingly used as an open alternative to proprietary bibliometric databases, but an important question remains: how reliable is its institutional affiliation data?

🚨Job Alert🚨 We are seeking to appoint 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹-𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 to join the EduTrack project consortium. 📅Application Deadline: August 15, 2026 https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_6122/jobs_fellowships_1910/post_doctoral_researchers_edutrack_15429 #Postdoc #Education #Demography

Global science is often described as if it were a single system. In reality, the conditions under which researchers work differ enormously from one country to another: funding, infrastructure, time for research, job security, academic freedom. 🧵

A new effort on reproducibility just published in Nature. I'm proud to be one of 400+ co-authors who contributed. www.nature.com/collections/... A large group of researchers set out to replicate, test for robustness, and assess reproducibility of findings across the social and behavioural sci.

Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences

Sweeping new investigations probe the replication, robustness and reproducibility of results across the behavioural and social sciences.

nature.com

"the government has been pursuing a plan to develop 400 world-class scientific journals as affordable alternatives to ones based in Western countries; by 2023 the country had about 178 English-language open-access journals, nearly half of which charged no APC" www.science.org/content/arti...

Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals

Move comes amid effort to grow the country’s own journals

science.org

For a change, something we made ourselves: Together with my colleagues Tobias Roth, Andreas Horr, and @nataliebackes.bsky.social, we examined ethnic rent penalties. Do migrants pay higher rents for comparable housing than natives with similar characteristics? direct.mit.edu/euso/article...

Migrant rent penalties in the German housing market

Abstract. We investigate whether migrants pay higher rents for comparable housing than natives with similar characteristics using nationally representative data from the 2018 German Microcensus. The d...

direct.mit.edu

Last year, the KB presented the initial OPENBIB data release, which contains selected and curated metadata from OpenAlex. See this new blog post tinyurl.com/58zmb79z for an updated data release based on the OAL snapshot from July 25. This data release also features a KB author disambiguation system.

US policymakers & scientists show significantly lower support for proposals with China-based vs. Germany-based collaborators (US policymakers: 68% support for Germany-collaboration vs. 28% for identical China-collaboration proposals, US scientists: 48% vs. 30%) www.nber.org/papers/w34789

Geopolitics in the Evaluation of International Scientific Collaboration

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

nber.org

This is a new preprint on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international researcher mobility. The analysis estimates approximately 14,700 fewer international researcher movements between 2020 and 2022 than expected, corresponding to a global loss of about 3.7%. osf.io/preprints/so...

If someone paid you $4.75 every night you slept 7+ hours, would you sleep more? And--more importantly--would that increase in sleep change your behavior in other meaningful ways? This new paper ran an experiment to find out.

"This paper introduces a document type classifier with the purpose to optimise the distinction between research and non-research journal publications in OpenAlex" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Presenting a classifier to improve the identification of research journal publications in OpenAlex - Scientometrics

This paper introduces a document type classifier with the purpose to optimise the distinction between research and non-research journal publications in OpenAlex. Based on open metadata, the classifier...

link.springer.com

We're looking for a post-doc to join our international, multidisciplinary project looking at how evaluation systems influence researchers' questionable practices. A great chance to get involved with a collaborative team doing exciting work on research integrity. Get in touch if you're interested!

"...adoption of AI in science presents what seems to be a paradox: an expansion of individual scientists’ impact but a contraction in collective science’s reach, as AI-augmented work moves collectively towards areas richest in data" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This looks like a great opportunity! The University of Vienna invites applications for at least 40 fully funded, 4-year doctoral positions in the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies. careers.univie.ac.at/en/praedoc/p...

Explainers & tutorials are a great way to criticize current practices with a positive twist. Tailoring them to a specific substantive (!) subfield can greatly increase uptake. Forget about novelty; if some statistican said sth in the 70s but no one was around to hear it, say it again.>

Health professional mobility debates still focus on numbers. Who leaves. Who returns. How to offset shortages. This paper shows something else: international education reshapes how health professionals judge responsibility and act within constrained systems. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Internationally educated health professionals and health-system change: A global qualitative study

This article examines how internationally educated health professionals contribute to health system change on return to their countries of origin. Rather than treating return as reintegration or sk...

tandfonline.com

Scientific excellence is clustering in a few ‘superstar’ cities. New York, Boston, London and San Francisco now host 12% of the world's top scientists. The Global South remains largely absent, with the notable exception of Beijing's dramatic rise rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | RGS Journal | Wiley Online Library

Scientific excellence is clustering ever more tightly in a few ‘superstar’ cities. Four—New York, Boston, London and the San Francisco Bay Area—now host 12% of the world's top scientists. In contrast...

rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

🎄 Hope you’ve got all your presents ready 💝 Google search interest shows a stable pattern: 🎅 “Christmas gift wife” peaks just before Christmas Eve 🎅 “Christmas gift husband” peaks much earlier #MerryChristmas to all of you! 🎁 📈 Google Trends (Nov 18–Dec 24, 2020–2024) #dataviz #ggplot2

The Robust Bayesian Meta-Analysis package got updated with additional vignettes explaining how to perform Bayesian model-averaged publication bias-adjusted - multilevel meta-analysis (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...) - multilevel meta-regression (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...)

Delighted to share this very important article with sobering results relevant for all migration researchers worldwide. Lead by @carrasco-jig.bsky.social, together with @mariegodin.bsky.social, @cvar-sil.bsky.social and yours truly. Open Access here: doi.org/10.1057/s415...

Only 40 % of the publications identified as top 3 in self-evaluations also rank among the top 3 by citation performance (based on a survey of 2,331 researchers). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Assessing scientific output through self-evaluation: Evidence from four social science fields

We asked academics from the economics, political science, psychology, and sociology departments of the top 500 universities to state their top 3 publi…

sciencedirect.com

China's unilateral visa-free policies have significantly increased the number of co-authored publications between China and other countries. This effect is achieved by enhancing transportation accessibility and mobility, which facilitates cross-border research collaboration arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12189

There seems to be a decrease in the coverage of affiliation metadata in #OpenAlex, particularly with regard to journal articles published by Elsevier since 2024. Only around 6% of Elsevier articles published in 2025 have affiliation metadata. subugoe.github.io/scholcomm_an...

Decreasing affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex – Scholarly Communication Analytics

This blog post examines the decrease in affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex. An analysis of over 13 million articles published by major commercial publishers between 2018 and 2025 suggests that ...

subugoe.github.io

This article revisits the early history of Soviet scientometrics, examining the role of Zinaida Mulchenko in writing Naukometriya... Mulchenko’s diminished positionality as the co-author of the book can be understood through the lens of the Matilda Effect direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

The Matilda Effect in Soviet scientometrics? Nalimov, Mulchenko, and the origins of Naukometriya

Abstract. This article revisits the early history of Soviet scientometrics, examining the role of Zinaida Mulchenko in writing Naukometriya – the foundational book in this field. While Vasily V. Nalim...

direct.mit.edu

Very glad to see this collaborative work w/ Robin Haunschild and @lutzb.bsky.social published in Journal of Informetrics "A study of gender and regional differences in scientific mobility and immobility among researchers identified as potentially talented" Open Access here: doi.org/10.1016/j.jo...

Studying social sciences & humanities makes students more left-leaning, controlling for initial views & major preference, driven by cultural views. Implies that if all students majored in business, college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by 1/3 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🧵 1/ 🚨 New paper out in PLOS ONE! w/ @caropradier.bsky.social @benzpierre.bsky.social @natsush.bsky.social @ipoga.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social We studied 43k authors and 264k citation links in U.S. economics to ask: 👉 Why do some papers cite others? 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

"significant differences between legitimate and potentially predatory publishers are evident in terms of text length, metadata, visual complexity, and typography." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Evaluating the visual design of science publications—a quantitative approach comparing legitimate and predatory journal papers - Scientometrics

The rise of predatory publishing poses a significant challenge to the integrity of scientific research, potentially undermining the credibility of scholarly communications. As parts of the academic co...

link.springer.com

I just reviewed the article 'Implicit reporting standards in bibliometric research: what can reviewers' comments tell us about reporting completeness?' by @dimitystephen.bsky.social and colleagues. I like the article a lot! Article: arxiv.org/abs/2508.162... Review: prereview.org/reviews/1739...