Category: Comments & Discussion Points
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How are we encouraging predatory publishers?
Recently, Scholarly Open Access, an authoritative blog that tracks the activity of predatory publishers, issued a warning (link no longer active) about The International Journal of English Language, Literature & Humanities (I used to have a link to them as well, but I decided they don’t deserve one), a fraudulent journal that seems to target ELT professionals.…
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“Exclusively hiring native speakers is not discrimination” Seriously?
A reaction to prevailing practices in language education that continue to discriminate against qualified teachers who are not native speakers
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Three reasons why I dislike ResearchGate
If you are interested in professional networking, chances are that you’ve come across articles such as this one or this one, suggesting that all researchers really should create a ResearchGate profile, because ResearchGate is – we are told – Facebook for scientists. To be honest, I am not convinced, and in this post I want to explain why. Is…
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“Impact factor is a scam”, argues Curt Rice
Curt Rice, the head of the Board for Current Research Information System in Norway (CRIStin), recently published an interesting article on his blog, discussing the uses and abuses of the impact factor. This is reproduced, by kind permission, below: Quality control in research: the mysterious case of the bouncing impact factor Research must be reliable…
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Elephants, self-promotion, and academic self-presentation
For today, I had originally planned to post some thoughts on Teaching English to Very Young learners, drawing on a small scale inquiry I ran online over the last 10 days. However, that post has been de-prioritised, and in its place I’d like to engage in some rather shameless self-promotion, which I will then use as a springboard in…
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If Scotland votes for independence, what happens to the language?
More than thirty years ago, linguists ventured a guess that the rise in Scottish nationalism might lead to Scottish English re-asserting itself. Were they right?
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Possible scam involving academic publishing?
You will never get a fee for publishing in an academic journal. According to a recent post in Scholarly Open Access (a now [2019] defunct blog, which used to report on academic publishing scams), there is at least one academic publisher so keen to recruit authors and editors that they offer rewards of “1,000-10,000 dollars as…
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Thoughts on academic blogging, again
About this post: After publishing my last post on academic blogging, I was asked for permission to have it republished in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog. I was happy and honoured by the request, but I felt that the content and layout of the post could be improved upon, before being made available to a…
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Thoughts on academic blogging
This post has been prompted by a small personal landmark. Earlier today, this blog passed the 30,000 views mark, after about 30 months of operation. Of course, the views are not evenly distributed: for more than a year after it was created, this webspace operated mostly as an online CV/academic homepage, and the blog section…