A simple example, to start with! Each time when in your bibliography or scientific work you cite 90% of the time authors from the north/west despite the fact that similar works are conducted in the south/east, you are committing an epistemicid! You are making other productions invisible and marginal by giving an exclusive legitimacy to only some circles of knowledge production.
Another example, is the Islamic tradition of the « halaqa » in producing knowledge and as a research and academic methodology revolving around debate and discussion. A form or method that existed in the Islamic era in spain, and that no longer exists today in the academic world.
A definition according to Quora: « Its a systematic destruction of any indigenous knowledge base. Any knowledge which doesn’t converge with the perpetrator’s knowledge system. It doesn’t believe in fusion or exchange of knowledge but complete disregard of the other’s knowledge. »
Durant les prémisses de la crise, on a pu observer des « achats de panique » : forte fréquentation dans les magasins, produits en rupture, chaîne d’approvisionnement en tension…. Dans cet épisode, nous revenons sur ce phénomène d’achat de panique et de prophétie autoréalisatrice, en revenant notamment quelques facteurs psychosociaux comme la réactance psychologique, le conformisme et la preuve sociale, et enfin le rôle de la communication politique et des médias. Nous verrons que ces « achats de panique » en cette crise pandémique sont peut-être mal nommés, car de tels achats ne relèvent pas nécessairement de comportements irrationnels ou se réduisant à le peur d’une pénurie ; plus encore, faire ses courses ne consistent pas seulement à se ravitailler, mais aussi à se rassurer.
An Ohio-based watchdog organization, Stop Animal Exploitation Now, called on WSU President Kirk Schulz to launch a full investigation into the university’s animal research programs in a letter sent to him on June 29.
The letter includes retractions of three WSU journal articles and three non-compliance reports sent to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare by Christopher Keane, WSU vice president for research.
SAEN alleges that WSU research staff falsified and fabricated data, fatally overdosed animals, and failed to follow approved protocols and administer pain relief, according to the letter.
“Washington State University staff is clearly utterly unqualified for their positions,” SAEN Executive Director Michael Budkie wrote in the letter.
Nos choix actuels vont déterminer si nous allons vers l’extinction ou la résilience. Le point sans filtre avec cette conférence d’Aurélien Barrau à l’Ecole de Management de Grenoble.
Document rédigé par Véronique des Garets – Professeur, Université de Tours
298 soutenances de thèse en sciences de gestion ont été intégrées en 2020 dans notre observatoire, soit légèrement moins qu’en 2019.
Cette baisse du nombre de thèses recensées peut être attribuée à la situation exceptionnelle que nous avons connue en 2020 avec des candidats dont les recueils de données ou analyses des résultats ont pu être perturbés par la situation sanitaire et l’impossibilité d’accéder aux salles de recherche dans les universités. Certaines soutenances de thèse ont également dû être décalées au début de l’année 2021.
Les thèses recensées ici sont celles soutenues en France (métropole et outre-mer) issues du site theses.fr, du site Sudoc, des thèses reçues directement à la FNEGE et des écoles doctorales ou laboratoires qui ont été interrogés. Seules les thèses de doctorat ont été considérées dans cette première partie de l’observatoire.
Consulter gratuitement les données de l’Observatoire des thèses de l’année 2020 sur le site de la FNEGE
Journals are retracting more and more papers because they’re not by the authors they claim to be
By Rhea Moutafis
The amount of low-quality (and no-quality) papers in science is increasing. Image by author
he practice of science involves trying to find things out about the world by using rigid logic and testing every assumption. Researchers then write up any important findings in papers and submit them for possible publication. After a peer-review process, in which other scientists check that the research is sound, journals publish papers for public consumption.
You might therefore reasonably believe that published papers are quite reliable and meet high-quality standards. You might expect small mistakes that got overlooked during peer review, but no major blunders. It’s science, after all!
You’d be wrong in expecting this, though. Real and good science does exist, but there’s a worrying amount of bogus research out there, too. And in the last few years, it has increased in volume at lightning speed, as evidenced by the skyrocketing number of paper retractions.
Fake science
A number of practices currently threaten to undermine the legitimacy of scientific research. They include made-up authors, the addition of scientists who had nothing to do with a paper as a co-writer and even more nefarious practices like swamping journals with submissions from low-quality, AI-written junk.
CWTS published the 2021 edition of the Leiden Ranking, providing detailed bibliometric statistics for a large number of universities worldwide. The number of universities that meet the publication threshold for inclusion in the Leiden Ranking has increased from 1176 in the 2020 edition of the ranking to 1225 in this year’s edition. These 1225 universities are located in 69 countries. This year four new countries have entered the Leiden Ranking with at least one university: Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, and Vietnam. The ranking now includes universities from 69 countries. China has the largest number of universities in the Leiden Ranking (221), followed by the United States (200).
We will see in the coming days more and more critics of China to accuse it concerning the Covid19 of negligence or of concealing facts, except we all know that all this is political and aims to slow down the meteoric rise of China and its Russian partner in all scientific, economic and even military fields.
I see mediocre documentaries on Western media accusing China of all the ills in the world. China is scary, because China has the political unity, the vision and the discipline to pretend to become the new world superpower. China has no colonial ambitions and has not had any in the past! China is looking for prosperity and trade and not some obscure agendas with messianic and eschatological aims as could be the case for some of the proponents of the Abrahamic discourse.
We must expect to see in the months and years to come more and more provocations and defamations against China. The Uighurs are used as a tool to break geographically the road and belt initiative, is a false casus belli aimed at demonizing China in the eyes of Muslims. China has had Muslims on it’s territory for 14 centuries and it was going well, like Russia too, which has always been multiethnic and multi-confessional and on the whole this cohabitation has been possible unlike the West which has known tragedies going as far as at the inquisition, crusades and many other brutal episodes. Moreover, one statistic is enough to understand some realities! Russia contains as many Muslims (nearly 20 million) as the entire Western bloc combined, so Russia and China can pretend to have diversity and multi-ethnic societies compared to some other parts of the world. Nowadays the world plunges into intellectual dictatorship and even recalling these kinds of basic facts bothers those who want to sell inaccurate versions of history to the world.
It is time for humanity to open it’s eyes to the agenda towards which the current order is leading us and to avoid these types of pitfalls! China and Russia are not enemies! They are a necessary and beneficial counter-power to counterbalance the continuous drifts of the current world order.
China and Russia have to enhance their soft power and be more assertive in presenting their project and explain to the masses what is their vision for this century. They realized great achievements but they have to be more persuasive and convincing and present them to the masses.
According to the soft power 30 rankings (https://softpower30.com/), China & Russia are classified as being weak on influence and their soft power while they have all the assets and arguments to be at the top of the list, whether for education, culture, digital, etc.
Here is an example on the preparation for the pandemic made by a Western support (the source used here is Statista), they designated the Anglo-Saxon countries as being the best prepared before the start of the current Covid19 crisis. China was designated as relatively weak in terms of preparedness.
The reality on the ground has shown the opposite, since China managed the crisis very well despite being affected among the first (There are chances that the virus started in other countries before the official version of Wuhan) and also having a genetically homogeneous population which would be more conducive to the spread of the virus. So the same logic applies to other financial rating institutes, socio-political think tanks, rankings often with a Western perspective that is often not neutral or balanced.
I think of rating agencies, rankings of innovation, quality of life, freedom, and those multitudes of documents and reports made to produce a mental image often far from reality, and this is why totalitarian systems want to control the information feed to be sure that only their version and views are presented as the dominant narrative. I have many examples in mind that I could cite in a more detailed article later.
To summarize the way of seeing the world and its dynamics strongly influences decisions and projections for the future and the world has already changed in terms of power, it’s time for the new forces to be more confident because they have many strengths and positive things to share with mankind.
One of the most striking developments in collegiate life since World War II has been the increased emphasis in the academy on publishing and research. Teaching loads until recently were falling, and at the highest ranked schools the senior faculty often teach but one class a semester, with frequent leaves for major research projects.
One of the things quite striking to me is how incomprehensible the typical academic paper sounds today to more than 99% of the population compared with what was the case in say 1925 or 1950. In that earlier period, an educated lay person could, for example, understand the gist of most articles in the American Economic Review with little or no economics; that is not true today. Scholars strive to sound profound and think that using big words or flaunting their knowledge of esoteric technical procedures or statistical techniques makes them somehow better, more educated scholars. Even some professors of English literature, from whom we might expect lyrically beautiful and lucid discourse, often write using pseudo-sophisticated academic drivel incomprehensible to those outside today’s literary cognoscenti.
In the popular press, writers strive to be understood, quoted, and, above all, read by large numbers. In academia, almost the opposite is true. Academics rejoice in their obscurity amongst the broader public. There are exceptions to be sure. Far more people read and ponder my writings for Forbes or the Wall Street Journal than my serious articles in outlets like the Journal of Economic History or Public Choice. I constantly hear from readers “you are one of the few academic economists I can understand.”
The human brain is a splendor and a fabulous divine gift, but it must be guided by ethical values so that the low attempts and mediocre incentives around money, power, status and other vices do not deviate it from its way. I am giving this example because 4 years ago I read a book on « social sciences as modern day witchcraft-sorcery » by Stanislav Andreski, where he observed a tendency towards complexity, empty jargon, etc … and I think that many disciplines in the academic world have been infiltrated by a dangerous productivist logic of capitalism instead of focusing on building a sound body of knowledge. So what we believe is a gain in ‘production’ is in reality a waste of resources, if what is produced has no real value and if no one can really understand the big picture of what is being produced. The quest for the holy grail of science to have a new scientific revolution will not succeed without a return of morality / ethics and the humility to recognize that the machine is in the wrong direction. The concern is that knowledge can only claim to have a supreme value if it is detached from these material and often miserable worldly considerations! For example, the current disciplinary approach with the publish or perish culture is symptomatic of an academic world where no one is interested in what is really going on, or seeks to understand the meaning of what is produced and published. Today, the noble research has become a ‘tool’ for the bureaucratic ascent to the top of the academic ivory tower to collect more titles and benefits, but if you look closely, you can see that it is a tower of babel built on a quagmire and shifting sands, and this culture has so pervaded the system that no person / institution says they have the courage to seek to correct things! The universities that deserve to be on the world top rankings and be the authentic leaders are those who will have the courage and determination to start thinking how to change this system and tackle this deviation. These are the bright minds that will will be the legitimate academics and scholars of the next two decades (YB)
Science is one of the ways to reach the holy grail, it tracks down details, symbols and decodes signs (where minds challenge each other and create innovative explanations of the world) hoping with humility to reach the truth! If it decodes these signs to satisfy vanity indicators (publication metrics), then it brings us closer to falsehood than to the truth. Academia should be a safe space where money/power incentives doesn’t pollute it’s noble mission. YB
A few weeks ago, I read a white paper produced by Rackspace Technology, How Applications Impact Customer Experience. (Spoiler alert: in a digital world, applications are customer experience, so you’d better make them delightful. As a result, CX has become the top priority CIOs and IT. Yay.)
Almost in passing, however, there was the chart above (I added the dotted line highlight).
CMOs were ranked second-to-last as members of the C-suite who best understand the importance, use, and bottom-line benefits of technology to business. Only CROs, who live in the same orbit as CMOs, were ranked lower (at a dismal 6% — yikes).
Read the full article from it’s source here at chiefmartec.com
Because the modern academic model has failed to provide relevant and practical research for managers, the technical people from the IT have taken over and are now piloting the marketing activity with the result of a disciplinary implosion with more than 8000 tools identified in the MarTech. Soon we will witness a major impact on the university curriculum and business schools because no one will know anymore what type of common knowledge, concepts, tools are useful/important for marketing majors and necessary to train in an effective way Business students. The present fragmentation is risky because it lacks a holistic approach and purpose in what is being done, the technical guys are good at having a narrow/focused view on their own niche of expertise but can’t convey the big picture, this should be the role of an ambitious academic community!Time to initiate a positive change to escape the technical inferno created by this lack of vision! (Yassine El Bouchikhi)
