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Category: Research

Scholarly Outputs

Every couple of years, I do an analysis of Candian university research ouptut data from the Leiden rankings, which always provide excellent and transparent data on publications and citations linked to each university. And, well, it’s that time again. So let’s dive in. My first comparison is just about simple production: how many papers came out of each university? Figure 1 shows the data from the period 2020-2023. This graph doesn’t change much over time: Toronto is always way, way,

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November 17, 2025 4 Comments

Defence/Security Research

I have some news today about a new HESA initiative to convene a National Defence Research Roundtable. More details at the end of the blog. But first, a bit of context on the defence and security research landscape. In recent months, the Government of Canada has committed the country to meeting the NATO Defence Spending Pledge. This pledge is for all members to spend 5% of their respective GDP on core defence requirements and broader defence- and security-related spending by

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November 12, 2025 1 Comment

That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.  You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give

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October 8, 2025 No Comments

Notes on Research Policy, Here and Abroad

Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada. One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the federal government is slashing the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. If the Swiss, a technological powerhouse of a nation, with a broad left-right coalition in

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October 6, 2025 1 Comment

The Shrinking Research University Business Model

For most of the past 30 or so years, big Canadian universities have all been working off more or less the same business model: find areas where you can make big profits and use those profits to make yourself more research-intensive. That’s it. That’s the whole model. International students? Big profit centres. Professional programs? You better believe those are money-makers. Undergraduate studies – well, they might not make that much money in toto but holy moly first-year students are taken

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September 16, 2025 6 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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