Death threats, ghost researchers and sock puppets: Inside the weird, wild world of dodgy academic research
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/on-the-trail-of-dodgy-academic-research/100788052
More than 46 of Shadi Riahi’s publications with Dr Nazari have now been retracted for plagiarism, duplication of data and forged authorship.
“People try and fake everything,” said Ivan Oransky, who has spent years researching scientific misconduct on his blog Retraction Watch.
investigative journalist Brian Deer, who discovered Dr Wakefield had multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest and that the study of just 12 children had been rigged.
But the damage had already been done.
Vaccination rates in the United Kingdom hit a low of 80 per cent in the early 2000s, leaving children unprotected from serious diseases. The repercussions are still being felt today, with Dr Wakefield being hailed as a hero by vaccine sceptics.
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more on peer reviewed fake papers in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china+peer+review
More than 300 scientists have told Mark Zuckerberg they want access to Meta’s internal research on child and teen mental health because it doesn’t meet scientific standards
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-open-letter-kids-mental-health-300-scientists-2021-12
The letter concludes by asking Meta to create an independent oversight trust that would monitor and study adolescent and child mental health.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri is due to testify before Congress about children’s safety on the platform Tuesday.
a Forrester survey of 4,602 Americans aged 12 to 17, published last month, found that 63% of respondents used TikTok on a weekly basis compared with 57% for Instagram. It also found 72% of respondents used YouTube weekly. It did not mention Facebook.
ExLibris Report: “Exploring the Challenges of Researchers and Research Offices”
- COVID-19 has affected research funding significantly, with STEM fields seeing an increase in funding, while in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, funding is declining.
- Funding remains a key challenge for researchers.
- The showcasing of research and expertise is increasing in importance
- Research office members and researchers differ in the way in which they measure research impact.
- The administrative burden on researchers continues to be a major challenge. Seven out of 10 researchers spend at least 30% of their time on administrative tasks. The core expertise of libraries and research offices is still underutilized.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration is high on researchers’ agenda, with 37% of researchers saying that most or all of their work involves interdisciplinary collaboration. This figure aligns somewhat with research office priorities; 25% of research office leaders stated that promoting interdisciplinary collaboration is a priority.
- Researchers expect more from their library than in 2020. Although 61% of researchers expressed satisfaction with the support they receive from their institution’s library, they expect more assistance than in 2020, especially with data-related services and services such as publication depositing.
- Collaboration between research offices and libraries has risen in 2021.
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More on academic research in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Academic+research
The Qualitative Landscape of Information Literacy Research: Perspectives, Methods and Techniques
Annemaree Lloyd
https://www.alastore.ala.org/infolitresearch?_zs=HxthW1&_zl=7kkv7
- situating information literacy research;
- informing information literacy research;
- framing information literacy pedagogy;
- qualitative methods;
- quantitative and mixed method approaches;
- data collection;
- planning for research; and
- evaluating information literacy research.
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more on information literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=information+literacy
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-05-10-why-tech-companies-view-the-job-search-as-big-business
“jobtech”—to be approximately $40 billion in size, and growing rapidly.
These emerging companies bridge the gap between people and jobs by matching, training, and often literally placing candidates into positions. That’s different from edtech, which focuses on the learning but not the workforce connection; and from HR tech, which prioritizes recruiting but not training or skills development. It’s more than the professional networks and digital job boards that put all the pressure and responsibility on the worker. And it has the potential to address the pain points of both students and workers who are underemployed, or newly unemployed due to the pandemic, by translating skills and experiences into positive labor market outcomes.
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more on employment in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=employment
The dark side of education research: widespread bias
Johns Hopkins study finds that insider research shows 70 percent more benefits to students than independent research
https://hechingerreport.org/the-dark-side-of-education-research-widespread-bias/
The study, “Do Developer-Commissioned Evaluations Inflate Effect Sizes?”
There are a number of reasons for why developer studies tend to show stronger results, according to Wolf, whose full time work is to evaluate educational programs. The first is that a company is unlikely to publish unfavorable results. Wolf speculates that developers are more likely to “brand a failed trial a ‘pilot’ and file it away.”
This isn’t the first study to detect bias in education research. The problem of hiding unfavorable results from publication was documented as far back as 1995. In 2016, one of Wolf’s co-authors, Robert Slavin, wrote about the positive results that researchers get when they devise their own measures to prove that their inventions work.