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Category: Research

Basic Research Turns 67

Here’s an interesting little nugget: “basic research,” like the atomic bomb, was born in July 1945. The term did not exist until coined by Vannevar Bush for his work Science: the Endless Frontier, a roadmap for post-war American science policy commissioned by President Roosevelt. Prior to WWII, no distinction was made between “basic” and “applied” science; although some sciences were obviously more theoretical than others, it was widely recognized that science was always “applied,” at least to some degree. After

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August 13, 2012 2 Comments

Student Summer Unemployment

Summer employment for students, being a vital source of both income and experience, is one of those things that everyone agrees is really important but almost nobody understands. What students actually do in the summer months is a messy mix of work, school, volunteering and (occasionally) bumming around. Today, we’re releasing the 2012 edition of our series on summer employment (co-authored by new HESA associate Jacqueline Lambert and yours truly), entitled Making the Most of It: Canadian Student Employment in

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July 23, 2012 No Comments

Just Over the Horizon

Recently I was asked about what I thought the big upcoming challenges – beyond the regular budget stuff – were for universities and colleges. From the shortest-term to the longest-term, my answer was: Not Getting Ahead of the Metrics Game. A perennial topic, but no less important for that. In every recession, governments re-double their efforts to manage the system through metrics. The odds are very strong that government-designed metrics are going to be goofy in the extreme (anyone remember

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July 9, 2012 1 Comment

Bibliometrics: Canada’s Top Ten Science Faculties

We promise fun bibliometric data, we deliver fun bibiometric data. Today: we show you how to use H-index data to identify the top ten science faculties in Canada. As we saw yesterday, science has the highest average H-index of any field; the average Canadian science professor has an H-index of 10.6. Recall that the H-index is the largest number of publications for which one also has at least the same number of citations – five papers with at least five

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June 12, 2012 2 Comments

Back to Bibliometrics

About two months ago, we did a series on bibliometrics (if you missed it the first time out, you can catch up here), and promised we’d be back shortly with some new results. Well, we’ll those results will be released Wednesday, and we think they’re so interesting that we’ll be spending all week telling you about them. For bibliometrics to be really useful, they need to (a) be able to capture information about both productivity and impact, (b) be easy

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June 11, 2012 No 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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