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Category: Research

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No Comments

Toxic Colleagues and Academic Freedom

You may remember in the fall of 2018, there was a bit of a brouhaha around a case at Thompson Rivers University concerning a professor named Derek Pyne.  The upshot of the story is that Pyne, a professor of economics, published an article in 2017 (see here) which attracted wide attention, including from The Economist.  Dr. Pyne’s article suggested that the majority of researchers at a small, unnamed Business School – quite transparently the one at TRU where he was employed – published in

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December 11, 2019 3 Comments

Changing Finances of World-Class Universities Part 3

So now we come to the heart of the matter: what’s actually going on in terms of publication outcomes (both the number and the impact)? For the first couple of graphs, I’m going to include the 11 top-200 schools from the People’s Republic of China just for the sheer fun of it (I have China data for research, but not finances). Figure 1 takes shows the increase in research output at top-200 universities, by country, for the years 2014-2017 over

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October 24, 2019 1 Comment

The Changing Finances of World-Class Universities (part 1)

Last week, I was in Shanghai at the biennial World-Class Universities Conference, held by the Academic Ranking of World Universities/Shanghai Rankings Consultancy, for which I have the honour to sit on the advisory board.  I was presenting some work-in-progress that we have going at HESA Towers concerning the finances of the world’s top universities, and thought I could share some of our findings with you over the next couple of days. (I know, I know, y’all want to know what

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October 22, 2019 1 Comment

Who Are Canada’s Research Powerhouses?

Yesterday, the good folks at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University released their 2019 world ranking of university research output.  This is – in my opinion – the best bibliometric ranking out there: it is complete, nuanced and the people putting it out have thought hard and responsibly about what it means to use quantitatively evaluate research.  I thought it was time to have a quick look at the research landscape across Canada. Let’s start with raw

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May 16, 2019 5 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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