academia

Didier Ruedin

Academic Spam

I guess I’ve got used to academic spam — invitations to publish in predatory journals. They typically scrape conference programmes, but today I got a surprising one:

I congratulate you on the paper “<paper title>”, published in the “3rd ISA Forum of SOCIOLOGY 2016”. Observing the relevance and contribution that the paper has in the field of study addressed, after analyzed by our editorial board, I invite you to publish it in <journal paper>

Mail

Yes, it took them four years to “read” the conference paper. We also get the usual nonsense of being invited, and pretension of the journal being important, but the time lag… I’m sorry, you’re simply too late.

Didier Ruedin

Seeking blog contributions: The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Junior Researchers

The NCCR on the move is going to run a blog series on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on junior researchers. This is your opportunity to tell the world how Covid-19 disrupted mobility and may have disrupted your career.

The full call is here: https://nccr-onthemove.ch/events/disrupted-mobilities-disrupted-careers-the-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-junior-researchers/ — write them until 4 December 2020 if you’re interested.

The focus is on early career researchers as the most vulnerable among the academic tribe, often in precarious positions and apparently pushed to international mobility to hopefully get ahead.

Didier Ruedin

Liza Mügge on Political Science and Gender

Here’s a recent interview where Sanne van Oosten interviews Liza Mügge on political science and gender.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/an-interdisciplinary-and-international-perspective-an-interview-with-liza-mugge/4FC502016AAA6D4C5071A29FE204AE07

Van Oosten, S., & Mügge, L. (2020). AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZA MÜGGE. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(2), 308-309. doi:10.1017/S1049096519002105

Didier Ruedin

Dear journals…

…can we please universally start accepting tables and figures as part of the manuscript during review (i.e., not at the end)? It’s a pain to either scroll up and down, or open a second instance of the PDF just so that I can actually understand what I’m reading. Yes, I understand that there are historical reasons for this, and it facilitates production, but at the time of writing and reviewing, we have different concerns (plus: production gets paid, I don’t). Journals have managed to move from printed copies to digital copies of the manuscript, so there is no reason we cannot do the next step…