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The activities of academic researchers are increasingly regulated by neo-liberal ideals, including expectations that researchers are visible online and actively promote their output. The purpose of this paper is to explore how researchers take on this responsibility. It uses the concepts of genre, authorship and self-writing in order to understand how the story of an academic life is constructed on academic web profiles.

A qualitative content analysis was conducted of material on 64 profiles belonging to 20 researchers on institutional and personal websites, as well as on ResearchGate, Academica.edu and Google Scholar.

The study shows that while institutional websites primarily contain researcher-produced material, content on commercial platforms is often co-constructed through distributed authorship by the researcher, the platform and other platform users. Nine different ways in which the profile of an “academic self” may be said to highlight the particular strengths of a researcher are identified. These include both metrics-based strengths and qualitative forms of information about the academic life, such as experience, the importance of their research and good teaching.

This study of academic web profiles contributes to a better understanding of how researchers self-govern the story of their academic self, or resist such governance, in online environments.

The study furthers the knowledge of how researchers make use of and respond to digital tools for online visibility opportunities and how the story of the “academic self” is “made” for such public presentation.

Background: How many higher education researchers are there in the world? How many academic articles are published by researchers each year? This paper aims to answer these two questions by tracking the number of higher education teachers and the number of publications over the past four decades.

Methods: We collected data on the number of higher education institutions and researchers from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the US, China, and UK governments (three countries with the largest number of academic publications in recent years). We used Scopus to obtain the number of publications per year. The growth of higher education researchers and academic publications were characterized using 4-parameter logistic models.

Results: The number of higher education teachers-cum-researchers increased from 4 million in 1980 to 13.1 million in 2018 worldwide. Concurrently, the number of academic publications increased from 0.65 million in 1980 to 3.16 million in 2018 based on data from Scopus. At the country level, the number of academic publications from the USA increased from 0.15 million in 1980 to 0.70 million in 2018, while that from China increased by almost 1,000 times from 629 in 1980 to 0.60 million in 2018.

Conclusions: The number of higher education researchers would reach 13.6 million and they would publish 3.21 million academic articles in 2020, imposing enormous pressure to publishers, peer-reviewers, and people who want to understand emerging scientific development. Additionally, not all academic publications are easily assessable because most articles are behind pay-walls. In addition, unethical research practices including falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, slicing publication, publication in a predatory journal or conference, etc. may hinder scientific and human development.

Several frameworks have been developed to map and document scientific societal interaction and impact, each reflecting the specific forms of impact and interaction that characterize different academic fields. The ReAct taxonomy was developed to register data about “productive interactions” and provide an overview of research activities within the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The purpose of the present research is to examine whether the SSH-oriented taxonomy is relevant to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines when clarifying societal interactions and impact, and whether the taxonomy adds value to the traditional STEM impact indicators such as citation scores and H-index.

The research question was investigated through qualitative interviews with nine STEM researchers. During the interviews, the ReAct taxonomy and visual research profiles based on the ReAct categories were used to encourage and ensure in-depth discussions. The visual research profiles were based on publicly available material on the research activities of the interviewees.

The study provided an insight into how STEM researchers assessed the importance of mapping societal interactions as a background for describing research impact, including which indicators are useful for expressing societal relevance and impact. With regard to the differences between STEM and SSH, the study identified a high degree of cohesion and uniformity in the importance of indicators. Differences were more closely related to the purpose of mapping and impact assessment than between scientific fields. The importance of amalgamation and synergy between academic and societal activities was also emphasised and clarified.

The findings highlight the importance of mapping societal activities and impact, and that societal indicators should be seen as inspiring guidelines depending on purpose and use. A significant contribution is the identification of both uniformity and diversity between the main fields of SSH and STEM, as well as the connection between the choice of indicators and the purpose of mapping, e.g. for impact measurement, profiling, or career development.

The work sheds light on STEM researchers' views on research mapping, visualisation and impact assessment, including similarities and differences between STEM and SSH research.

Universities are expected to accelerate and optimize their role as economic growth engines. Technology transfer is a traditional way of expanding knowledge exchange, and it is typically used in hard sciences. This paper aims to discuss academic consultancy as a novel way to bring especially social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA sciences) knowledge into the society. In addition, it seeks practical ways to combine both university’s and individual researcher’s needs in consultancy.

A case study comprising interviews at two Finnish universities was conducted. Literature on academic consulting was used as background knowledge. International benchmarking was done through interviews and desk top studies. Some background statistics was extracted from the financial database for received research funding from businesses and ministries.

Corporate funding is most prominent in hard sciences, and SSHA sciences seem to get their funding mainly from public sources. SSHA researchers provide services for firms, but these relationships are generally private. According to interviews, there is will to consult firms through university, but researcher’s time limitations, remuneration and academic merit related to consultancy are important factors when consultancy guidelines are drawn. The administration view is expanded from only research staff to include the entire university knowledge production ecosystem and its members.

Acknowledging the value of SSHA sciences is topical because the respect towards humanities and social studies seems to be in decline in some developed countries. However, according to this study, academic consulting could have great potential in bringing the human perspective into the digitalized society. The quantification of knowledge exchange would benefit from formal, institutionalized consultancy sales. More studies are needed to assess the impact of academic consultancy on society.

This purpose of this study is to examine future fears and reassurances about the nature of the recent artificial intelligence (AI) language model-based application, ChatGPT, use in the fields of scientific research and academic works and assignments. This study aims at exploring the positive and negative aspects of the use of ChatGPT by researchers and students. This paper recommends some practical academic steps and suggestions that help the researchers and publishers curtail the percentage of spread of unethical works such as plagiarism.

The emergence of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) has recently sparked controversy and heated debate among academics worldwide about its use and application. The concern of experts and researchers about the GPT-3 platform entails how it would be of much support to the researchers and academic staff and how it might be used and misused to negatively affect academic and scholarly works. This research explored future fears and reassurances about the nature of Chat GPT-3 use at academic and scientific levels. The data for this research was obtained through the qualitative interviews of seven experts in AI, scientific research and academic works. The findings of the study showed that ChatGPT-3 has significant potential and is helpful if used wisely and ethically at scientific and academic levels. On the other hand, the results reported the experts' fears of the frequent use of ChatGPT including the misuse of ChatGPT as a tool to plagiarize and make the researchers dependent, not self-reliant and lazy. The widespread concern of many scholars is that ChatGPT would lead to an increase in the possibility of plagiarism and provide less control over research and writing ethics. This study proposed some stages and suggested that AI language model programs, including ChatGPT, should be integrated with widespread publishers and academic platforms to curtail the percentage of plagiarism and organize the process of publishing and writing scientific research and academic works to save the rights of researchers and writers.

The findings of the research presented that ChatGPT can act as a potential and useful tool if used wisely and ethically at scientific and academic fields. On contrast, the results also reported the negative aspects of the extensive ChatGPT's that leads to the spread of plagiarism and making the researchers and the students machine-dependent, not self-reliant and lazy. This study proposed some stages and suggested that AI language model programs, including ChatGPT, should be integrated with widespread publishers and academic platforms to curtail the percentage of plagiarism and organize the process of publishing and writing scientific research and academic works to save rights of researchers and writers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind to highlight the relationship between using ChatGPT and the spread of both positive and negative aspects of its extensive use in scientific research and academic work. The importance of this study lies in the fact that it presents the concerns and future fears of people in academia as they cope with and deal with the inevitable reality of AI language models such as ChatGPT.

Knowledge sharing in research communities has been considered indispensable to progress in science. The aim of this paper is to analyze the mechanisms restricting knowledge sharing in science. It considers three categories of academia–industry knowledge transfer and a range of individual and contextual variables as possible predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions.

A unique empirical data sample was collected based on a survey among 212 life science researchers affiliated with universities and other non-profit research institutions. A rich descriptive analysis was followed by binominal regression analysis, including relevant checks for the robustness of the results.

Researchers in academia who actively collaborate with industry are more likely to omit relevant content from publications in co-authorship with other academic researchers; delay their co-authored publications, exclude relevant content during public presentations; and deny requests for access to their unpublished and published knowledge.

This study informs policymakers that different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions are predicted by different individual and contextual factors, which suggests that policies concerning academia–industry knowledge and technology transfer should be tailored to contextual specificities.

This study contributes new predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions to the literature on academia–industry interactions, including outcome expectations, trust and sharing climate. This study augments the knowledge management literature by separately considering the roles of various academic knowledge-transfer activities in instigating different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions in scientific research.

This article reports on three related empirical studies of the relevance of academic research to management practice in the field of business‐to‐business marketing. These studies comprise a survey of 58 academic researchers, a qualitative study of ten marketing practitioners, and a qualitative study of eight academic researchers. Academic researchers in the field of business‐to‐business marketing believe that their work is of interest, potential value, and relevance to practitioners, and aspire to make a contribution to management practice. Practitioners claim not to be interested in academic research, and are more favourably disposed towards consultants, who they see as more responsive to, and understanding of, business pressures. It seems clear that although academics would like to get closer to practitioners, they are inhibited by institutional factors, such as academic reward systems and the “publish or perish” culture. Mechanisms for improving the degree of cooperation between researchers and practitioners are explored.

This chapter examines two different research approaches in education, namely “academic research” (rooted in theory) and “practitioner research” (rooted in practices), and some tensions that might arise from this distinction. It is suggested that the relationships between these two types of research are fuzzy, and that hybrid research studies (a mix of both theory and practice-guided research) are possible. The chapter also analyses both kinds of research in relation to etic and emic perspectives. In etic research, the researcher interprets data based on her theoretical frameworks, while in emic research the researcher is closer to the interpretations that social actors give to a particular social reality. It follows that, in higher education research, “academic research” would be likely to reflect an etic perspective (closer to theory) while “practitioner research” would reflect an emic perspective (closer to practice). However, in this chapter, it is proposed that both perspectives in research – etic and emic – constitute a continuum across which researchers need to move in a permanent, systematic, and reflective way. It is also proposed that the exercise of “epistemological vigilance” might help researchers to transit between etic and emic perspectives.

This paper aims to discuss what it means to consider the information experience of academic information management from a constructivist grounded theory perspective. Using a doctoral study in progress as a case illustration, the authors demonstrate how information experience research applies a wide lens to achieve a holistic view of information management phenomena. By unifying a range of elements, and understanding information and its management to be inseparable from the totality of human experience, an information experience perspective offers a fresh approach to answering today's research questions.

The case illustration is a constructivist grounded theory study using interactive interviews, an original form of semi-structured qualitative interviews combined with card-sorting exercises (Conrad and Tucker, 2019), to deepen reflections by participants and externalize their information experiences. The constructivist variant of grounded theory offers an inductive, exploratory approach to address the highly contextualized information experiences of student-researchers in managing academic information.

Preliminary results are reported in the form of three interpretative categories that outline the key aspects of the information experience for student-researchers. By presenting these initial results, the study demonstrates how the constructivist grounded theory methodology can illuminate multiple truths and bring a focus on interpretive practices to the understanding of information management experiences.

This new approach offers holistic insights into academic information management phenomena as contextual, fluid and informed by meaning-making and adaptive practices. Limitations include the small sample size customary to qualitative research, within one situated perspective on the academic information management experience.

The study demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contributions of the constructivist information experience research to illuminate information management in an academic setting.

The internet growth has created a new scientific communication system with new facilities that are competing with the traditional sources of information. The present study investigated impact of internet use on academic performance of teachers and researcher in university setup. The aim of this paper is to find out how these academics use internet sources and services? What is the user's satisfaction level with internet sources and services? And what problems has the user encountered when searching the information on the internet. It further aims to know how the user compares the internet sources with traditional information sources.

Questionnaires were distributed to randomly selected teachers and researchers in Kuvempu University, Karnataka state. Total 200 questionnaires were distributed out of which 140 duly filled questionnaires were returned. The questionnaire consisted of various questions which are designed for the teachers and researchers to elicit the impact of internet use on their academic performance.

This study has demonstrated the high use of the internet sources and services by teachers and researchers in university setup. Most of them used internet in support of their study and teaching. Majority of respondents learnt to use the internet through self-instruction and trial and error, with the help of friends and by reading books or papers. Study results also indicated that internet has made an impact on their academic performance (i.e. in writing more research papers, in doing better research, better learning experience, etc.).

This is the comprehensive study on the impact of internet sources and services on the academic performance of teachers and researchers in the university environment. Findings of the study will be helpful to university authority to enhance the internet facilities for effective and efficient use by the teachers and researchers. The study also suggested that there is a need to focus on opportunities for providing training on use advanced internet search skills to the academic community. Concerned authorities also need to enhance the internet bandwidth to increase the internet speed.