Want to know what everyone else has been reading on this year? This review counts down the ten most read posts on the LSE Impact Blog in 2023. Still want more blogposts? You can find all our annual reviews here.
10. What 40,000 job adverts say about academic career progression
Discussing the findings of a study of over 40,000 academic job ads, Lilia Mantai and Mauricio Marrone, highlight how the skills required for academic progression differ over career stage and geography.
9. Is writing a book chapter still a waste of time?
How has digital open access transformed academic communication for the better? LSE Press’s Editor in Chief, Patrick Dunleavy, explores the impact of chapters in edited books. Once the Cinderella of academic publishing, doomed to obscurity under paywall books’ formal and de facto access restrictions, chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources, and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.
8. The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore
Just as social media has become ubiquitous in academia, its established formats and dynamics have been brought into doubt. Björn Brembs argues that learned societies concerned with their core mission as societies should engage and lead developments on federated social media platforms, such as Mastodon.
Discussing their analysis of a new dataset of journals published via the Open Journals Systems publishing platform, Saurabh Khanna, Jon Ball, Juan Pablo Alperin and John Willinsky argue that rather than being an aspiration an open, regional and bibliodiverse publishing ecosystem is already in existence.
There is often an assumption in evidence based policy, that evidence means the findings of quantitative studies or randomised control trials. However, in practice evidence is often understood differently. Drawing on a study of Welsh policy actors, Eleanor MacKillop and James Downe highlight four different approaches to evidence in policymaking and suggest how researchers and policy organisations might use these findings to engage differently with policy.
5. How to use generative AI creatively in Higher Education
Generative AI presents clear implications for teaching and learning in higher education. Drawing on their experience as early adopters of ChatGPT and DALL.E2 for teaching and learning, Bert Verhoeven and Vishal Rana present four ways they can be used to promote creativity and engagement from students.
4. Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do
There is often a presumption amongst scientists that communicating the evidence on a given issue is on its own persuasive enough to change minds. Anne H. Toomey argues thinking in this way itself ignores evidence from other fields of research and presents four ways by which researchers can engage with findings from the social sciences to better communicate their work.
3. Racism and classism in elite universities are deliberate mechanisms used to maintain privilege
Racist and classist mechanisms within higher education are often presented as abstract intangible processes that produce unequal outcomes for those attending university from non-traditional backgrounds. Drawing on evidence from their new book, Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers, argue whilst racism and classism can be systemic, it also directly and in plain sight supports and rewards the already privileged.
2. LawGPT? How AI is Reshaping the Legal Profession
Generative AI is causing many fields of expert and professional knowledge to reassess fundamental practices and their value. Taking law, a field that has long been warned of potential threats of automation, as a focus, Giulia Gentile outlines the socio-technical challenges facing the discipline and considers how new technology may rebalance relationships between lawyers, technologists and clients.
1. What would honest university rankings look like?
University rankings and their subsequent league tables presuppose higher education institutions exist in a linear hierarchical structure and that presenting information in this way is useful to prospective students. Deploying a comparable methodology to the rankers, Kyle Grayson and Paul Grayson argue that English universities largely fall into two non-hierarchical groups with comparable characteristics.
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