The blind spots of academic quality assurance
Explore how routine quality assurance in research reporting can overlook complex questions of authorship, contribution, and academic integrity.
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QISS
Quality in Scientific Scholarship
An interdisciplinary research group at UiA
Ensuring research that counts — for more than just numbers Check out our research and activities
About the research group
The Quality in Scientific Scholarship (QISS) research group is an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Agder, Norway.
The group's research focuses on research quality, research culture, and research funding and career management, and contributes to both the theoretical and empirical developments within the field. QISS also aims to contribute to broader knowledge sharing and competence building related to quality in scientific scholarship. The group's work thus aims to strengthen the basis for qualified decision-making in research policy as well as contribute to education and talent development, including PhD educations.
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Our focus areas
Research quality
Research quality is a cornerstone of scientific scholarship, ensuring that research outputs not only are valid but also contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge. The rise of predatory journals and the misuse of publication metrics, like citations , impact factor, and h-index, threaten the quality of academic publishing. These issues can incentivize quantity over quality, leading to a proliferation of substandard research. Addressing these challenges requires a commitment to ethical publication practices, robust editorial oversight, and the promotion of models for assessing research quality that preserves virtuous scientific behaviours.
Research culture
Education and training are foundational to cultivating a culture of excellence and integrity in scientific scholarship. It is necessary to develop robust educational programs and training initiatives, aimed at equipping researchers—especially early-career scientists and research managers—with the skills and knowledge necessary to uphold the highest standards of research quality. By focusing on education and training in scientific scholarship, the aim is to support the research community so that reliable, impactful, and ethically sound scientific results can be produced.
Research funding and career management
Research funding and the criteria employed for hiring and promotion play an important role in shaping scientific work, influencing not only what research is conducted but also how it is conducted. A critical aspect is that the principles affecting the allocation of financial resources and career progression may introduce biases into research, where researchers may face ethical dilemmas in balancing the expectations of funders and employers with their commitment to unbiased scientific inquiry.
I argue that very high publication rates should be seen as indicating poor authorship practices and should be discounted in evaluating track record.
Given the workload and time pressures associated with their role, editors face an important ethical dilemma: Should they allocate sufficient time to the editorial role or should they focus on their individual research performance, which is an important determinant of salary increases, promotions, and other financial rewards?
It is easy to become an author in scientific journals now but, what are the implications?
Latest posts
When “top journals” stop being about knowledge: Reflections from an ICT4D researcher
Journal rankings may signal prestige, but they risk privileging conformity over intellectual plurality and misunderstand how meaningful scholarship actually develops and circulates.
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From “you should” to “I can”: The positive power and academic pressure
The pressure to publish – and the exponential growth in submission and publication rates – is often attributed to the managerialism that has swept across academia globally. But what if the pressure to publish does not arise only from the evaluation system
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A research publishing system at a crossroads
Academic publishing has never been a still pond. It has always shifted with technology, institutional priorities, and the circulation of ideas. Yet the pace and direction of those shifts have changed dramatically in the past two decades.
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