‘A lot of room for bias’: UK funder’s data point to uneven playing field

Woolston, Chris

doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00645-4

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They need to represent our authors so that they can review and recommend other reviewers from the regions where the scholarship is being undertaken. This helps minimize reviewer bias, which happens even in double-blind reviewer processes like in Climate and Development, and also ensures accuracy (Woolston, 2021). Some evidence indicates that having more female scholars on editorial boards leads to more female reviewers; if one benefit of reviewing is that it improves a reviewers' writing as well, this would benefit female authors (Fox et al, 2019).…”

Section: What Can Scholars Do?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

Schipper¹,

Ensor²,

Mukherji³

et al. 2021

Climate and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: What Can Scholars Do?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

Schipper¹,

Ensor²,

Mukherji³

et al. 2021

Climate and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…More generally, expert reviewers can be the most critical (Gallo et al ., 2016). Reviewers might also be biased by gender (Ceci and Williams, 2011; Fox and Paine, 2019), nationality (Harris et al ., 2017; Primack et al ., 2009; Thelwall et al ., 2021), ethnicity (Woolston, 2021) and prestige (Tomkins et al ., 2017). Cognitive cronyism, in the sense of judging results from known specialism better, is widely suspected but with little evidence (Lee et al ., 2013; Wang and Sandström, 2015) and it is possible that cognitive cronies are more critical because they are more expert (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Terms in journal articles associating with high quality: can qualitative research be world-leading?

Thelwall

Kousha²,

Abdoli³

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

PurposeScholars often aim to conduct high quality research and their success is judged primarily by peer reviewers. Research quality is difficult for either group to identify, however and misunderstandings can reduce the efficiency of the scientific enterprise. In response, we use a novel term association strategy to seek quantitative evidence of aspects of research that are associated with high or low quality.Design/methodology/approachWe extracted the words and 2–5-word phrases most strongly associated with different quality scores in each of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. We extracted the terms from 122,331 journal articles 2014–2020 with individual REF2021 quality scores.FindingsThe terms associating with high- or low-quality scores vary between fields but relate to writing styles, methods and topics. We show that the first-person writing style strongly associates with higher quality research in many areas because it is the norm for a set of large prestigious journals. We found methods and topics that associate with both high- and low-quality scores. Worryingly, terms associated with educational and qualitative research attract lower quality scores in multiple areas. REF experts may rarely give high scores to qualitative or educational research because the authors tend to be less competent, because it is harder to do world leading research with these themes, or because they do not value them.Originality/valueThis is the first investigation of journal article terms associating with research quality.

show abstract

‘A lot of room for bias’: UK funder’s data point to uneven playing field

Abstract: A UK funder's diversity review has found gender -but not racial -equality in successful grant applications.

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

Terms in journal articles associating with high quality: can qualitative research be world-leading?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About