Download - Rotterdam, 17 June, 2014
Rotterdam, 17 June, 2014
On the Circumstances Conducive to
World-class Publications
Pearl A. Dykstra
Seminar “Research Impact and Relevance – How to
Publish a World-class Paper”
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Institutional circumstances: KNAW’s quality assessment
•Across all areas of science
•Participation in ERiC* en SIAMPI** (focus on
assessment social relevance)
•Standard Evaluation Protocol (with VSNU &
NWO)
*Evaluating Research in Context **Social Impact Assessment Methods through the study of Productive Interactions between science and society
Engineering/design
Humanities
For English version of reports: knaw.nl
Social sciences
Different cultures of publishing
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Shifting incentive structures
•From quantity to quality of publications
•Integrity increasingly subject to accountability
•Greater emphasis on social relevance
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Infrastructural circumstances, an example
Quality: achieved by addressing new researchquestions
From the start: the NKPS is a multi-actor,
multi-method, panel study on solidarity in family
relationships
As opportunities presented themselves:
collaboration NKPS with historians, record
linkage, Generations and Gender Programme
25 dissertations to date
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Individual circumstances: crafting scholarship
Writing is not easy!
•Schedule writing time
•Review other people’s work
•Collaborate with more experienced peers
•Prewrite, write, rewrite
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Wrapping up
•World-class publications are a collective
enterprise
•We all need to be quality watchdogs
Click to add titleRoscigno, V. J., & Danaher, W. F. (2001). Media and mobilization: The case of radio and southern textile worker insurgency. American Sociological Review, 66, 21-48. (Available here) Why world class?•Smart idea to use media technology as the bridge between two partial theories of collective action (perceptions of opportunity and group identity) •Creative combination of different kinds of existing data (historical data on strikes by textile factory workers, geographic information on the location of radio stations, content of FD Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats, song lyrics)
A World-Class Paper - I
Click to add titleTalhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., & Kitayama, S. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture, Science, 344, 603-608. (available here) Why world-class?•Three contrasting theoretical perspectives for why some cultures are more interdependent and others are more independent (modernization, pathogen prevalence, and rice versus wheat cultivation •Excellent data to test the predictions (different regions in China) •Creative measures of interdependence-independence
A World-Class Paper - II