Researcher (senior)

Academics should not sneer at Simon Birmingham’s appeal to what ‘most Australians’ would think about projects, says Hannah Forsyth

The furore over Brian Wansink’s data handling overlooks the fact that science should above all be about explanation, argues Martin Cohen

Both the rationale and the mechanism for redistributing research activity around the regions are far from clear cut, say Sarah Chaytor and Graeme Reid   

Take-up of research by business is difficult to catalyse and record. Far better to focus on the impact central to universities’ missions, say Vince Mitchell and William Harvey

Female-only professorships will speed progress to gender equality in the academy, but the pushback shows how far there still is to go, says Clare Kelly

PhDs are becoming more programmatic in many countries, but the German one-on-one model retains considerable influence, says Glen Jones

As winter’s tunnel looms, academics would do well not to retreat into lonely silos, says Alison Newby

Jack Grove asks whether those who lead academic departments and universities can still realistically find the time to be effective researchers

Depositories of original sources were once bulging with academics, but few scholars seem to have time to visit them now, says Arnold Harvey

If access to European research funding is to be maintained, more UK research universities need to forge formal links with EU institutions, says Peter Coveney

Dutch figures show just how little time professors get for their own research. It may be easier to pursue your intellectual interests outside the university system, says THE reporter David Matthews

Pioneer of the genetics of hearing talks about how her research interests have been shaped by wine and music – and how she would cope with deafness

If you want your manuscript to be accepted, pepper it with formulaic neologisms, irrelevant but impressive references and suitably indented vulgarity, advises Janelle Ward

If women in particular must watch what they say for fear of a social media mauling, public scholarly fora will be the poorer, warns Charlotte Galpin

Political efforts to silence academic critics are unlikely to end despite clarification that universities are not obliged to ban them, says Pushkar

Matthew Reisz praises the researchers who go way beyond the call of duty in investigating the world for us all

Displays, debates, delights; Allied leaders’ letters; big questions answered; and a groundbreaking trial that never was

Simon Baker weighs the evidence for the transformation of the country’s higher education system

Nick Hillman disputes a narrative that assumes all would be well if ‘experts’ were put in charge

Authoritarian populist governments prevent bloc from taking action to protect academic freedom, say scholars

While widening access is high on universities’ agendas at undergraduate level, class barriers still prevail in the academy. Here, five working-class scholars describe their experiences of ‘otherness’

Tsinghua provost urges researchers to take the risks required to achieve major breakthroughs

King’s College London scholar says that ‘a growing tide’ of academics now recognise that scientific meetings can no longer be held in the US

Members say professional organisations dependent on income from subscription-model journals face ‘existential’ threat from landmark open access policy

Younger academics spending far less time on scholarship than in leading nations, analysis suggests

The withdrawal of funding for Ontario’s basic income pilot highlights the perils of working on politically funded research, says Evelyn Forget

The relaxation of the research excellence framework’s submission rules could see research-intensive universities clustered on near-maximum scores, warms Dominic Dean

Seeking a greater share of imagined profits from commercialisation would undermine technology transfer, says David Secher

Unwieldy bureaucracy, infrastructure challenges and scant funding all hold back innovation in Indian higher education. Philip Altbach and Eldho Mathews assess the country’s current strategies for transforming its universities

Guilty pleasures, the people’s voice examined, toothsome characters and the daily grind, Roman style

Many retired academics embrace the freedom to fully embody their view of the serious scholar, says Bruce Macfarlane

Academia’s exacting standards on attribution are spot on. It is their inconsistent implementation that is the problem, says David Sanders

Scholars should not be walled off from mainstream biography’s playground of unlicensed fun, says Richard Bradford

The research excellence framework’s reliance on hasty peer review by generalists limits sample size and accuracy, three academics argue

Recording the day-to-day during the Holocaust did not restore victims’ sense of self, finds Dan Stone

Book of the week: In dire political times, Lyndsey Stonebridge discovers a welcome example of slow reading

Jenny Pickerill argues that we need more practical suggestions on how to tackle institutions’ resistance to decolonisation

Over time, one symbol of dehumanisation has served different purposes, finds Catherine Molineux

The good and evil of opium is documented in this eloquent history, writes Jonathan Mirsky

This deeply researched history of a conflict has an unfinished feel, finds Kori Schake

This unusual and intellectually invigorating book should be an essential starting point for feeling our way ahead in this field, says Shane O’Mara

Robert Montgomerie is impressed by a novel account of the backbone’s evolution

Up, up and away; hallowed grounds; degrees of evolution at Oxford; and making peace and making up

Science blooms when colleagues’ ideas cross-pollinate. Impediments to free movement will lead to a disastrous withering, says Sir Keith Burnett

The UK’s new research mega-body has huge power to tackle long-standing inequalities, says its new diversity tsar Jennifer Rubin

Book of the week: It is not so hard to tell when people are lying, says Robert Eaglestone, of an unconvincing analysis

The political craving for simple measures of learning gain is neither pedagogically informed nor sufficiently nuanced. Four academics argue that only by changing focus will the concept become useful

Yuval Noah Harari, having done the past and the future, offers us 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

A move to combat India’s love affair with predatory journals is an encouraging sign – even if it took a newspaper exposé to prompt it, says Pushkar

European funders’ beefed-up open access mandate sounds the death knell for subscription publishing, but academic Armageddon is no closer, says Lenny Teytelman

For internationalism to succeed, universities must engage more with their local communities and students, major study says

List of finalists for the ‘Oscars’ of the higher education sector released

Universities must look beyond a narrow conception of impact to communicate the true value of higher education to society, say Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Andreas Richter, Renée Schroeder and Lisa Sigl

Patriarchy’s perpetuators; magical morphing gender; a physicist’s-eye view of the world; and what’s with all those buttons?

A study of seemingly irrational romantic feelings reveals much about sexuality in 19th-century literature, finds Charlotte Jones

Book of the Week: Emma Rees on the key role of feelings in spurring individuals to political action

Peter J. Smith wishes the UK would adopt a US approach to making the Bard more accessible

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Transnational research is vital to academic pursuits but it shouldn’t be carried out at the cost of vulnerable people in resource-poor countries, says Kate Chatfield 

Bill Niven examines a project that attempted to preserve Teutonic traditions in the wake of defeat