Rotterdam, 17 June, 2014

On the Circumstances Conducive to

World-class Publications

Pearl A. Dykstra

Seminar “Research Impact and Relevance – How to

Publish a World-class Paper”

Click to add title

Institutional circumstances: KNAW’s quality assessment

•Across all areas of science

•Participation in ERiC* en SIAMPI** (focus on

assessment social relevance)

•Standard Evaluation Protocol (with VSNU &

NWO)

*Evaluating Research in Context **Social Impact Assessment Methods through the study of Productive Interactions between science and society

Engineering/design

Humanities

For English version of reports: knaw.nl

Social sciences

Different cultures of publishing

Click to add title

Shifting incentive structures

•From quantity to quality of publications

•Integrity increasingly subject to accountability

•Greater emphasis on social relevance

Click to add title

Infrastructural circumstances, an example

Quality: achieved by addressing new researchquestions

From the start: the NKPS is a multi-actor,

multi-method, panel study on solidarity in family

relationships

As opportunities presented themselves:

collaboration NKPS with historians, record

linkage, Generations and Gender Programme

25 dissertations to date

Click to add title

Individual circumstances: crafting scholarship

Writing is not easy!

•Schedule writing time

•Review other people’s work

•Collaborate with more experienced peers

•Prewrite, write, rewrite

Click to add title

Wrapping up

•World-class publications are a collective

enterprise

•We all need to be quality watchdogs

Click to add titleRoscigno, V. J., & Danaher, W. F. (2001). Media and mobilization: The case of radio and southern textile worker insurgency. American Sociological Review, 66, 21-48. (Available here) Why world class?•Smart idea to use media technology as the bridge between two partial theories of collective action  (perceptions of opportunity and group identity) •Creative combination of different kinds of existing data (historical data on strikes by textile factory workers, geographic information on the location of radio stations, content of FD Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats, song lyrics) 

A World-Class Paper - I

Click to add titleTalhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., & Kitayama, S. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat  agriculture, Science, 344, 603-608. (available here) Why world-class?•Three contrasting theoretical perspectives for why some cultures are more interdependent and others are more independent (modernization, pathogen prevalence, and rice versus wheat cultivation •Excellent data to test the predictions (different regions in China) •Creative measures of interdependence-independence 

A World-Class Paper - II