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Category: Research

The World’s Rising Scientific Research Nations

I was sitting at home this weekend, reading the UNESCO World Science Report (2021), as one does, when I started poking around with the actual bibliometric numbers.  And damned if there weren’t some big surprises in there.  First: what is the UNESCO World Science Report?  Well, it’s a pretty interesting document which has appeared periodically since 1993.  Over time, the document has become longer and more complicated.  And for the last few editions, it has produced some statistical annexes examining

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May 16, 2023 1 Comment

Research Re-shuffle

The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System released its report last week while I was playing boulevardier in Tokyo with Little Miss Sumo (somehow, I’d never really noticed what an enormous fraction of the city’s economy and real estate is devoted to cube toys and claw machines).  It’s more interesting than the usual Ottawa report, and not just because of the murky politics. The report begins with a problematique wheremost of the space was devoted to telling the

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March 27, 2023 1 Comment

Budgets, Control, Incentives, Rankings

Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings. One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been

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January 27, 2023 No Comments

Discovery Slowing?

There has been a lot of chat over the past few days about a paper by three American scholars (Michael Park, Erin Leahey and Russell Funk) published in Nature about the declining rate of innovation in academic science (available here).  The paper is interesting, but the very loud whining that has stemmed from it (see here and here but it was way worse on science twitter, trust me) is mostly pretty nonsensical.  Let me break it down for you. The

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January 10, 2023 4 Comments

The Meaning of Applied Research

Time was – say, for the thirty years or so after Vannevar Bush wrote Science: The Endless Frontier – everyone had a pretty good understanding of what was meant by the term “research”.  Basically, it was the stuff that pointy-headed people did in labs and was the opposite of “development”. Figure 1: Ancient Understanding of Research But then, people on the development end got a bit snippy.  They, too, did research, it just had a more focused sense of practical

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September 20, 2022 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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