🍎your Scholarly Digest 13th March, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Image Credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Hi Scholar,

Five years (and two days) ago, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. While lockdowns, masks, and Zoom fatigue defined daily life, something equally disruptive took place in academia: the way we disseminated knowledge changed.

Before the pandemic, research was disseminated at its usual pace: determined by peer review processes. But during the pandemic, researchers increasingly turned to preprints, circumventing traditional publishing bottlenecks to get urgent findings out now. To put it in perspective: in the five years before COVID-19, academic publishing grew at a steady 7% per year. In 2020, that number went up to 12% (source: dimensions.ai).

For all the talk of the ivory tower being detached from reality, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

BRAIN FOOD

Don’t Panic But Research is Really Complex

Metascience, or research on research, is paying closer attention to analytic flexibility, a phenomenon where researchers presented with the same data draw different conclusions. 

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