Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Social Media Report 2012

Released by Nielsen, State of the Media: Social Media Report 2012.
Click below for the full report.



Monday, October 22, 2012

ORCID has officially launched

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an initiative started in 2010 aimed at "providing a registry of persistent unique identifiers for researchers and scholars and automating linkages to research objects such as publications, grants, and patents."

Frequently Asked Questions


Friday, October 19, 2012

How today’s higher education faculty use social media

Pearson and the Babson Survey Research Group have released a survey on higher education faculty use social media. View the whole survey here (free registration required)


Highlights from the Executive Summary:
  • Young faculty members use social media at rates much higher than the rates for older faculty,a pattern that holds true for personal use, professional use, and use in teaching. 
  • Faculty match different sites to their different needs; the sites they visit most often for personal use (Facebook), professional use (LinkedIn), and for use for in teaching (Blogs and Wikis) are all different.
  • The use of social media among faculty is fluid and evolving. The mix of sites being used is changing over time. In 2011 Facebook was the most visited site for faculty professional purposes; by 2012 this has been replaced by LinkedIn. 
  • One area where adoption is almost universal is in the use of video for classes. Whether it is used in a class session or assigned for viewing outside of class, faculty are enthusiastic adopters of video. 

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Cite feature in Google Scholar

Scholar now offers the ability to format the articles in APA, MLA or Chicago style in one click.
To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result ( or click on More as the screenshot below illustrates) and select from the available citation styles


For more styles don't forget that you can export the scholar article references to a citation management software.



Monday, October 15, 2012

2012 Nobel Prize in Economics

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

has been awarded jointly to

Friday, October 5, 2012

American Publishers and Google reach an agreement

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced a settlement agreement that will provide access to publishers' in-copyright books and journals digitized by Google for its Google Library Project. The dismissal of the lawsuit will end seven years of litigation.



©
©
©



Thursday, September 20, 2012

Predicting 2012 Nobel Laureates

From the press release:
Annually, Thomson Reuters citation analysts mine proprietary data from the company’s research platform, Web of Knowledge™, to identify the most influential researchers in the categories of chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and economics. Based on a thorough review of citations to their research, the company names these high-impact researchers as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and predicts them to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the future.

Click on the door to view the next laureates predictions.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Google Scholar adds 'Updates'



Google Scholar has implemented a feature that will automatically bring to your attention articles relevant to your research.
Read the official announcement and the feedback from a satisfied researcher.
You do need to have a Google Scholar profile.



Tuesday, July 17, 2012

UVA, Rice, Duke and many more join Coursera: free online course platform

From Coursera's blog, 12 universities join the initial schools (Stanford, Princeton University and the universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan) to offer free online courses.


Coursera is a MOOC a Massive Open Online Course platform created by Stanford professors in late 2011.
You’ll be able to choose from more than 100 courses, from Professor Dan Ariely’s course on irrational behavior, to learning how to program in Scala (taught from the creator of Scala, Professor Martin Odersky from EPFL), to the legendary UVA course “How Things Work” with Professor Louis Bloomfield.

16 institutions have partnered with Coursera:

California Institute of Technology
Duke University
École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
Georgia Institute of Technology
Johns Hopkins University
Princeton University
Rice University
Stanford University
University of California, San Francisco
University of Edinburgh
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
University of Washington

Monday, July 9, 2012

Researchers of Tomorrow

Researchers of Tomorrow is the UK’s largest study to date on the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students (born between 1982 and 1994). JISC and the British Library jointly commissioned the three year study in 2009, which involved 17,000 doctoral students from 70 universities at various stages in the project.
Researchers of Tomorrow  

Friday, June 29, 2012

Top 10 journals in Management, Finance & Economics

The latest edition (2011) of the Journal Citation Reports has just been released. Academics can use this tool to rank several journals in different disciplines according to various fields such as Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Impact Factor and more.
Top 10 Journals in Management by Impact Factor
  1. Academy of management review
  2. Academy of Management Journal
  3. Academy of Management Learning & Education
  4. Journal of  Management
  5. Academy of Management Annals
  6. MIS Quarterly
  7. Journal of Operation Management
  8. Organization Science
  9. Journal of Applied Psychology
  10. Journal of Management Studies
Top 10 Journals in Finance by Impact Factor
  1. Review of Financial Studies
  2. Journal of  Finance
  3. Journal of Financial Economics
  4. Journal Accounting & Economics
  5. Accounting  Organizations and Society
  6. Journal of Banking and Finance
  7. Accounting Review
  8. Journal of Accounting Research
  9. IMF Economic Review
  10. Review of  Accounting Studies
Top 10 Journals in Economics by Impact Factor
  1. Journal of Economic Literature
  2. Quarterly Journal of Economics
  3. Review of Financial Studies
  4. Journal of  Finance
  5. Journal of Economic Perspectives
  6. Economic Geography
  7. American Economic Journal-Macroeconomics
  8. Journal of Financial Economics
  9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
  10. Journal Accounting & Economics

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as the number of citations in 2011 to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of items published in those same two years. 

For more categories and variables INSEAD users can login here.
Note: once on the platform, Business, Management, Finance, Economics and Psychology related fields are within the Social Sciences Edition -- Operations Research & Management is within the Science Edition.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Friday, June 15, 2012

Google's Knowledge Graph

Google's latest development on its search engine is explained in the video below and on this page.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

2012 - Top 10 issues for IT leaders in Higher Education

Top 10 IT issues 2012 - Educause survey.

  1. Updating IT professionals' skills and roles to accommodate emerging technologies and changing IT management and service delivery models
  2. Supporting the trends toward IT consumerization and bring-your-own device
  3. Developing an institution-wide cloud strategy
  4. Improving the institution's operational efficiency through information technology
  5. Integrating information technology into institutional decision-making
  6. Using analytics to support critical institutional outcomes
  7. Funding information technology strategically
  8. Transforming the institution's business with information technology
  9. Supporting the research mission through high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
  10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

Friday, May 25, 2012

How's your life?

Check out the newly released interactive OECD Better Life Index. You can also create your own better life index and have it compared to the average index. The index compares well-being based on 11 topics - housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance - and integrates data on gender and inequality

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

New look for Google Scholar

Google Scholar has a new look, read all about the changes from the Google Scholar announcement.

To access the advanced search features, users must click on the arrow in the search box and can refine the search without leaving the result page.



Monday, May 7, 2012

Free online courses from Harvard and MIT

Harvard and MIT have teamed up to release edX an open source platform to deliver online courses worldwide.
The schools have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration. Here is an excerpt of their FAQs.

Who can take edX courses? Will there be an admissions process?
EdX will be available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, and in general, there will not be an admissions process. For a modest fee, and as determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard, credentials will be granted only to students who earn them by demonstrating mastery of the material of a subject.

Is there anything innovative about the online technology?
Yes. It will move beyond the standard model of online education that relies on watching video content and will offer an interactive experience for students. And the technology will be open source; other universities will be able to leverage the innovative technology to create their own online offerings.

edX press conference:


Video streaming by Ustream

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

AAUP Faculty Salary report – 2011/2012

A Very Slow Recovery: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2011–12

The AAUP released its annual review of faculty compensation, read the April 9, 2012 press release.


Average Salary for Full-Time Faculty, by Category, Affiliation, and Academic Rank, 2011-12 
Adapted from this Higher Education article: Slow Recovery

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Academic salaries, an international comparison

The project led by a team of researchers from Russia's Higher School of Economics and Boston College in the USA looks at salary data from 28 countries.

The research will be available in an upcoming book: Paying the Professoriate: A Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts

Data is available on the project website
Click for bigger view

Friday, March 16, 2012

Tablet ownership triples among college students

The Pearson Foundation recently released their second annual survey on Students and Tablets.
Key findings:
  • Tablet ownership has more than tripled among college students since March 2011, with one-quarter of students now owning a standard tablet (25%), compared to only 7% in March 2011.
  •  Ownership of standard tablets among college-bound high school seniors has quadrupled from 4% in March 2011 to 17% in January 2012.
  • Among college students, one-third (35%) of those who own a standard tablet also own an e-book reader or small tablet device.
  • Almost one-half of current tablet owners (46%) say that they intend to purchase another tablet within the next six months.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The European Business Schools Women on Board Initiative

Several european business schools (including INSEAD) have come up with a list of:
"3500 board-ready women to bring Europe into the 21st Century and support European Commission Vice President Reding’s initiative to shatter the glass ceiling for women in Europe’s publicly listed corporation’s board rooms. "
Participating schools:

Press release

Monday, February 6, 2012

Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

A study was released in Science magazine on February 3rd: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing. 
The authors analyzed 6672 responses from a survey sent to researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines (marketing, management, finance, information systems, and accounting) as well as data from 832 journals in those same disciplines 
The survey results are available in the  supporting material along with a list of journals identified as 'coercers' by survey respondents. 
  1. Journal of Business Research 
  2. Journal of Retailing 
  3. Marketing Science 
  4. Journal of Banking and Finance 
  5. Information and Management 
  6. Applied Economics 
  7. Academy of Management Journal 
  8. Group and Organization Management 
  9. Journal of Consumer Psychology 
  10. Psychology and Marketing 
Conclusion from the paper:
Overall, the empirical results from the author survey and the journal-based data tell a consistent story. Coercive self-citation exists and is more common in the business disciplines than in economics, sociology, and psychology

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Elsevier under fire...again -- Updated

Update February 28, 2012:

  • In a press release, Elsevier announces that it withdraws its support for the Research Work Act (a bill that was threatening open public access of federally funded research).
  • In parallel it has announced to the Mathematics research community that it would reduce the price of access to articles in its math journals to no more than $11 per article and that it would make the articles in “14 core mathematics journals” free to the public four years after they are first published
This Inside HigherEd article also mentions that hours after Elsevier pulled out of the RWA, lawmakers killed the bill entirely.


This time the action comes from University of Cambrige mathematician Tim Gowers (Fields Medal winner in 1998) Here is his entire blog post: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly.
His call has been answered and a public website The Cost of Knowledge has already received over a thousand signatures from researchers all over the world.


Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. The main objections are these:
  1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
  1. They sell journals in very large "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
  1. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Apple enters the E-textbook market

While this is initially targeted to the high school market, there are obvious implications and potential for Higher Education.
NEW YORK—January 19, 2012—Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. [...]Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less [...].
Read the full press release

from Apple site.
For reactions to the announcement (Chronicle of Highed Ed. article.)

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Can Tweets Predict Citations?

Interesting article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research:
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact

The author, Gunther Eysenbach , concludes: 
Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.'