Another Year in Elephants
A wrap up of 2021 on Elephant in the Lab by the Editorial Team
How to find the right Survey Tool: Problems and Proposals
Sami Nenno on the typical problems of the most common service providers for conducting online surveys and how to find the right one for your own project.
Impact of social sciences – (How) Can it be measured?
A summary of the results of a workshop held by our authors on issues related to the measurability of the impact of the Social Sciences and Humanities.
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Are researchers the better politicians? Probably not. Or at least not necessarily. Politics and science work in fundamentally different ways and strive for their respective rationales. So being a good scientist does not necessarily qualify you to be a good politician. But at the same time, scientific advice can be crucial for well-founded and informed decision making. Providing scientific advice to politics and society has therefore long been part of the scientific community’s job description and has gained tremendous momentum in recent years. Elaborate systems for providing scientific policy advice have emerged in many countries, and in crises – such as Covid 19 – they have once again been able to demonstrate whether they can withstand such a stress test.
In the course of the pandemic, familiar problems became visible again. And while for a long time only experts and practitioners debated the work mode of scientific policy advice, it has suddenly become a public debate. What does good scientific advice for politics look like? Who is legitimately asked for advice and who offers it? How does good advice find its recipient? Is it better to give advice publicly or confidentially? How does the scientific system reward such commitment? How does quality assurance work? These are the questions we want to explore and find the holy grail of the best advice possible…
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Snails on the chase: How to cope with anxiety in an academic career
Zhao et al. on an individual’s role in the scientific system and some coping mechanisms to alleviate the stress of the precarious working conditions of early career academics.
Opening up the black box of teaching in a digital era
The Pandemic hit the vast majority of European HEI unprepared. The members of AEDiL saw this as a starting point for a collaborative project taking innovative methodological pathways.
Wikipedia as Science Communication: A Step-by-Step Guide
The Wikipedia community has become a source of information for a broad and global public. Paul and Max argue that contributing to the encyclopedia as a scholar can be a powerful way of achieving a strong societal impact of their own expertise. Furthermore they provide a guide on how to write your first contributions.
Possibilities for Change – Higher Education and Digitalisation
Bronwen and Moritz highlight the institutional challenges posed to Higher Education Institutions by the pandemic and outline how these can be viewed as a window of opportunity
How to structure a cumulative dissertation: Five strategies
In this article, Mennatullah Hendawy shares some insights on structuring cumulative dissertations based on her own experience
Breaking the status quo – The role of a small funding organization in gender mainstreaming
Donia Lasinger on the contribution of the Vienna Science and Technology Funds (WWTF) as a compareably small funding organization to equality of all genders
When your journal reads you
Renke Siems on user tracking on science publisher platforms, its implications for their individual users and ways to face this issue
On creating a good research environment
Sabine Müller on the hierarchical system of German academia and why it could be a problem for the wellbeing of young academics and Ph.D. candidates. She compares it to her experiences at Oxford University and sheds light on the differences between the two research cultures.
Reducing the power imbalances in academic letters of reference
Lucy G. Gillis on inequalities in science reproduced by letters of reference and how to encounter them