(5 Nov 2025) Recently, ABC News reported that a Murdoch University student was taking legal action over what he claims are false allegations of unauthorized AI use in an assignment. In subsequent weeks, another report from the same outlet revealed that several Australian universities had been using AI to detect AI in student work, sparking debate over…
Global higher education policies are often underpinned by bibliometric performance metrics. While these targets ostensibly aim at raising the quality of academic work, Aikerim Bektemirova argues in authoritarian states they can be deployed to discipline and constrain academic freedom. (29 Aug 2025) Across the world, academic metrics (journal impact factors, citation indexes and university rankings)…
(30 Jan 2024) The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has announced the launch of Reformscape – an online resource enabling the global academic community to explore and share examples of how to make hiring, promotion and tenure fairer, more robust and more diverse. For years, the traditional way in which academic careers are…
(2 Mar 2023) Since 2013, DORA has advocated a number of principles for responsible research evaluation, including avoiding the use of journal-based metrics as surrogate measures of research quality, recognizing a broader range of scholarly outputs in promotion, tenure, and review practices, and the importance of responsible research assessment as a mechanism to help address the…
(18 Feb 2020) Earlier this month the Center for Open Science (COS) formally launched TOP Factor, an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) based primarily on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. Alison Mudditt, Vice Chair of the COS Board explained more in detail and the background behind. Read the full story from…
(21 January 2019) Sascha Friesike, Benedikt Fecher and Gert. G. Wagner outline three systemic shifts in scholarly communication that render traditional bibliometric measures of impact outdated and call for a renewed debate on how we understand and measure research impact. Read the full story from LSE Impact Blog.
(20 August 2018) The Association of Research Libraries invites libraries to join the global assessment community of LibQUAL+® by registering for the 2019 LibQUAL+ survey. LibQUAL+ is a tool that libraries use to solicit, track, understand, and act upon users’ opinions of service quality. The protocol is a rigorously tested web survey that helps libraries…
Citation impact metrics are available for all peer-reviewed research journals, book series, conference proceedings and trade publications covered in Scopus (31 May 2018) The latest assessment of thousands of scholarly serial publications is now available with the release of the 2017 CiteScore metrics by Elsevier. CiteScore provides a set of simple, reproducible journal metrics that…
(4 April 2018) The proportion of multi-authored papers in the social sciences has risen steadily over recent decades. But what are the reasons behind such a marked increase? Lukas Kuld and John O’Hagan consider a number of explanations, from increased academic specialisation and more affordable communication and travel, to the pressures of publication and an…
(19 March 2018) Over the last couple of decades there has been an international push around the assessment of the wider societal impact of research. Kate Williams and Jonathan Grant document the evolution of research impact assessment in the UK and Australia, and how policies in the two countries have been seemingly interdependent, a back-and-forth…