Academic reward systems – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Strengthening the ecosystem for effective team science: A case study from University of California, Irvine, USA

September 12, 2024February 19, 2019

By Dan Stokols, Judith S. Olson, Maritza Salazar and Gary M. Olson

authors_dan-stokols_judith-olson_maritza-salazar_gary-olson — 1. Dan Stokols (biography)
2. Judith S. Olson (biography)
3. Maritza Salazar (biography)
4. Gary M. Olson (biography)

How can an ecosystem approach help in understanding and improving team science? How can this work in practice?

An Ecosystem Approach

Collaborations among scholars from different fields and their community partners are embedded in a multi-layered ecosystem ranging from micro to macro scales, and from local to more remote regions. Ecosystem levels include:

individual members of teams;
the teams to which they belong viewed as organizational units;
the broader institutional contexts (eg., universities, research institutes) that support multi-team systems; and,
their community and societal milieus (eg., science policies and priorities established by national and international agencies and foundations).

Tracking stakeholder engagement and research impact

August 24, 2025February 12, 2019

By Cathy Day

Is there an easy and efficient way to keep track of stakeholder engagement and research impact?

My colleagues and I have developed a system with two components: (1) noting engagement and impact soon after they occur and (2) recording them in a way that enables the information to be extracted for whatever purpose is required. I describe the tracking spreadsheet, the recording process we use and then how the spreadsheet is used for reporting.

Tracking spreadsheet

The Microsoft Excel tracking spreadsheet has two parts: (1) the engagement or impact and (2) the research to which these are related. These are arranged in columns, which can be adapted for the needs of any particular group.

Developing a ‘capabilities approach’ for measuring social impact

September 11, 2024November 27, 2018

By Daniel J. Hicks

daniel-hicks — Daniel J. Hicks (biography)

Why do familiar metrics of impact often seem “thin” or to miss the point of research designed to address real-world problems? Is there a better way to measure the social impact of research?

In a recent paper (Hicks et al., 2018), my coauthors and I identified a key limitation with current metrics and started to look at how concepts from philosophy — specifically, ethics — can help us explain the goals of our research, and potentially lead to better metrics.

What’s the problem?

To understand the limitations of current metrics for measuring the social impact of research, it is useful to understand two distinctions, between resources and goals and between inward-facing and outward-facing goals for research.

Collaboration and team science: Top ten take aways

December 18, 2024July 24, 2018

By L. Michelle Bennett and Christophe Marchand

authors_l-michelle-bennett_christophe-marchand — 1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Christophe Marchand (biography)

What are the key lessons for building a successful collaborative team? A new version of the Collaboration and Team Science Field Guide (Bennett et al., 2018) provides ten top take aways:

1. TRUST
It is almost impossible to imagine a successful collaboration without trust. Trust provides the foundation for a team. Trust is necessary for establishing other aspects of a successful collaboration such as psychological safety, candid conversation, a positive team dynamic, and successful conflict management.

Institutionalising interdisciplinarity: Lessons from Latin America / Institucionalizar la interdisciplina: Lecciones desde América Latina

July 18, 2023July 17, 2018

By Bianca Vienni Baptista, Federico Vasen and Juan Carlos Villa Soto

authors_bianca-vienni_federico-vasen_juan-carlos-villa-soto — 1. Bianca Vienni Baptista (biography)
2. Federico Vasen (biography)
3. Juan Carlos Villa Soto (biography)

A Spanish version of this post is available

What lessons and challenges about institutionalising interdisciplinarity can be systematized from experiences in Latin American universities?

We analyzed three organizational structures in three different countries to find common challenges and lessons learned that transcend national contexts and the particularities of individual universities. The three case studies are located in:

Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. The Argentinian center (1986 – 2003) was created in a top-down manner without participation of the academic community, and its relative novelty in organizational terms was also a cause of its instability and later closure.
Universidad de la República in Uruguay. The Uruguayan case, started in 2008, shows an innovative experience in organizational terms based on a highly interactive and participatory process.
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The Mexican initiative, which began in 1986, shows a center with a network structure in organizational terms where the focus was redefined over time.

Doing a transdisciplinary PhD? Four tips to convince the examiners about your data

November 12, 2020March 20, 2018

By Jane Palmer, Dena Fam, Tanzi Smith and Jenny Kent

author-mosaic_jane-palmer,_dena-fam_tanzi-smith_jenny-kent — 1. Jane Palmer (biography)
2. Dena Fam (biography)
3. Tanzi Smith (biography)
4. Jenny Kent (biography)

How can research writing best be crafted to present transdisciplinarity? How can doctoral candidates effectively communicate to examiners a clear understanding of ‘data’, what it is and how the thesis uses it convincingly?

The authors have all recently completed transdisciplinary doctorates in the field of sustainable futures and use this experience to highlight the challenges of crafting a convincing piece of research writing that also makes claims of transdisciplinarity (Palmer et al., 2018). We propose four strategies for working with data convincingly when undertaking transdisciplinary doctoral research.

Three lessons from statistics for interdisciplinarians and fellow travellers

September 11, 2024December 12, 2017

By Gabriele Bammer

In last week’s blog post on recognising interdisciplinary expertise I argued that forming a new i2S discipline could help embed interdisciplinarity and related approaches (transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, T-shaped research and others) in the academic mainstream. But how would such a discipline work? What are the challenges to establishing an i2S discipline and how could they be overcome?

The discipline of statistics provides three productive analogies. Key to success in both statistics and i2S are: collaboration, dedicated journals to publish advances in concepts and methods, and lobbying for effective application of the discipline.

One university’s response to addressing complex real-world problems / Respuesta de una universidad para afrontar problemas complejos del mundo real

December 19, 2022November 28, 2017

By Carlos Mataix, Javier Carrasco, Sara Romero and Marcel Bursztyn

authors_mosaic_carlos-mataix_javier-carrasco_sara-romero_marcel-bursztyn — 1. Carlos Mataix (biography)
2. Javier Carrasco (biography)
3. Sara Romero (biography)
4. Marcel Bursztyn (biography)

A Spanish version of this post is available

How can universities more effectively address complex real-world problems, especially in sustainable development? What’s needed is not only disciplinary expertise, but also an ability to deal with systems problems involving wicked dynamic interrelations and a diversity of stakeholders, with varying levels of power to design and implement solutions. Researchers need to interact with a diversity of actors, inside and outside the academic community and to take into account diverse mental frameworks, languages, cultures and interests.

The Innovation and Technology for Development Centre at the Technical University of Madrid (itdUPM)

A growing number of faculty members at the Technical University of Madrid have sought to address this challenge, leading to the creation in March 2012 of the Innovation and Technology for Development Centre (itdUPM).

Promotion and tenure policies for interdisciplinary and collaborative research

September 21, 2022October 10, 2017

By Julie Thompson Klein and Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski

authors_mosaic_julie-thompson-klein_holly-falk-krzesinski — 1. Julie Thompson Klein’s biography
2. Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski (biography)

Expanding interest in interdisciplinary and collaborative research across universities, funding agencies, professional organizations, and science-policy bodies has prompted growing attention to the academic reward system. Promotion and tenure loom large in this discussion. The acronym “P&T” in this blog is the customary abbreviation for “promotion and tenure” in North America, but the practices are international. All collaborative research is not interdisciplinary, and all interdisciplinary research is not team based. However, they are coupled increasingly in order to address complex scientific and societal problems, while also fostering innovation and partnerships bridging the academy and industry.

Responsive research – simple, right? The AskFuse case study

July 13, 2021July 11, 2017

By Rosemary Rushmer

Researchers are constantly being challenged to demonstrate that their research can make a difference and has impact. Practice and policy partners are similarly challenged to demonstrate that their decisions and activity are informed by the evidence base. It sounds like all we need to do is join the two groups together – simple, right?

In Fuse (the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, www.fuse.ac.uk) we wanted to do exactly that. We wanted to supply the evidence that end-users said they wanted (supply and demand), and make it easy for them to access and use research evidence.

Yet, we knew that current approaches to supplying evidence (briefs, guidelines, publications) do not work as well as we once thought they did. It needed a re-think…

Whose side are we on and for whom do we write?

December 18, 2024February 14, 2017

By Jon Warren and Kayleigh Garthwaite

authors_jon-warren_kayleigh-garthwaite — 1. Jon Warren (biography)
2. Kayleigh Garthwaite (biography)

In 1967 Howard Becker posed the question – to academics – “Whose side are we on?”.

Becker was discussing the question during the time of civil rights, the Vietnam war and widespread social change in the US. He sparked a debate about objectivity and value neutrality which had long featured as part of the social sciences’ methodological foundations and which has implications beyond the social sciences for all academics.

What relevance do these ideas have now, in an era when academics and their research are becoming increasingly commodified? Academics are increasingly pressured by their own institutions and fellow professionals to gain more funding, publish more papers and make more impact. Questions of social justice and professional integrity are at risk of being swamped by these forces allied to unscrupulous careerism.

We argue that the question now is not only who academics serve but also who we write for.

Reinventing science? From open source to open science

June 25, 2025December 16, 2015

By Alexey Voinov

Science is getting increasingly bureaucratized, more and more driven by metrics and indices, which have very little to do with the actual scientific content and recognition among peers. This is actively supported by the still dominant for-profit publication mechanism, which harvests products of scientific research for free, processes, reviews and edits them using voluntary work of scientists themselves and then sells the resulting papers back to the scientific community at obscene costs. The original ideals of scientific pursuit of truth for the sake of the betterment of humanity are diluted and forfeited in the exhausting race for grants, tenure, patents, citations and nominations. Something has to change, especially in the era of post-normal science when so much is at stake, and so little is actually done to address the mounting problems of the environment and society.

In computer programming open source emerged in the 1980s largely in opposition to attempts at licensing code and the growing dominance of Windows with the annoyingly secretive policies of Microsoft. It came as the idealistic philosophy of software development that stems from the so-called “gift culture” and “gift economy” based on this culture.