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In recent times, universities have been faced with the challenge of implementing neoliberal ideas as a survival tactic. For instance, there is increasing pressure on academics globally to publish because of performance funding and other metrics like global rankings, which consider where and how much academics publish. This study explores how neoliberalism in higher education has influenced the academic profession.

The study used two New Zealand universities as case studies to understand how the universities' academics respond to government formula for allocating public funding to universities and also how the universities respond to the changing higher education system in New Zealand. In total, 21 academics were interviewed and documents such as the strategic plans of the universities; policies, guidelines and procedures; Tertiary Education Union reports and media reports were analysed.

The study finds that neoliberal practices could lead to occupational stress that comes with the pressure to publish, increased teaching workload and casualisation of the academic job, especially amongst emerging academics.

Whilst the topic is not entirely original, this study is pertinent and offers the following advice to stakeholders. A university's success is a function of its academics, and academics perform at an exceptional level because academics want to, not because academics are being made to. Unless governments and universities address the intense competition that results from funding allocation procedures, the less well-off academics will fail and some will be forced to compromise the duties that academics have. A collaborative and collegial higher education system that focuses on serving the public good can be an alternative.

This study aims to present the current state of published literature concerning halal tourism and hospitality studies.

This research discovered 314 Scopus documents from 2003 until 2023 regarding existing studies related to this field. The present study then used a bibliometric analysis of this data set. The present research analysed the documents' bibliographical data based on year, source title, country of origin, institution, authors, keywords and citations. Microsoft Excel, bibliometrix, Harzing's Publish or Perish and VOSviewer software applications were used to conduct a frequency analysis, evaluate the impact and map bibliometric networks regarding halal hospitality. This study has presented the evolution of publications in the research field by year, the top players in source titles, countries, institutions and authors. This paper also evaluated the intellectual structure of existing research concerning halal tourism and hospitality and presented the most influential documents in this field. There were 112.21 citations per year, 7.21 per paper and 3.14 authors per paper.

The findings revealed that the study trend concerning halal tourism and hospitality had attracted the attention of academics and developed into a significant field in 2016. Malaysia and Indonesia have been the major contributors to halal hospitality research, with the highest proportion of authors.

In general, this study also has limitations similar to other studies. The research data were derived solely from the Scopus database, which has the advantage of being the most comprehensive database indexing all scientific works, even though it does not easily cover all available sources.

The present research has differed from previous research in that it examined literature published in Scopus concerning research on halal hospitality from 2003 to 2022. It analysed bibliographic data by year, source title, country, institution, author, keywords and citations.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how retracted scientific papers become zombie papers and why they are problematic and to encourage librarians to become active in addressing these problems.

This paper explains what zombie papers are, how they are created and the potential impact they can have on the body of scientific literature. It explains how and why they are different than other common types of misleading scientific publications. It also explores recent developments such as the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and changes to organizations that make data about paper retractions available.

While journal retractions are as old as scientific publishing itself, the seriousness of retractions persisting and being used in the body of scientific literature has recently been recognized as a serious concern. The rise of new AI technologies such as ChatGPT has made the presence of zombie papers in the data used to train large language models (LLMs) extremely concerning.

While librarians are well-aware of journal retractions and most include information about them in their information literacy training, concerns around zombie papers and their potential presence in the data used to train LLMs will likely be a new consideration for most.

It's hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs in significant ways across the globe and between researchers, institutions and fields of study; and there are many questions that exclusive action can't address. There are also broad ecosystem-level questions that need answering. For these reasons alone, global approaches to reform are needed.

The first step in this exploration isn't to start looking for “solutions”, but to develop a better understanding of how our needs and interests overlap. By identifying the broad contours of common ground in this conversation, we can build the guardrails and mileposts for our collaborative efforts and then allow the finer-grained details of community-developed plans more flexibility and guidance to evolve over time.

What are these overlapping interests? First, the people in this community share a common motive – idealism – to make research better able to serve the public good. We also share a common desire to unleash the power of open to improve research and accelerate discovery; we are all willing to fix issues now instead of waiting for market forces or government intervention to do this for us; and we want to ensure that everyone everywhere has equitable access to knowledge.

There is also very broad agreement in this community about which specific problems in scholarly communication need to be fixed and why, and well as many overlapping beliefs in this community. OSI participants have concluded that four such beliefs best define our common ground: (1) research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) successful solutions will require broad collaboration; (3) connected issues need to be addressed, and (4) open isn't a single outcome, but a spectrum.

OSI has been observing and debating the activity in scholarly communication since late 2014 with regard to understanding possible global approaches and solutions for improving the future of open research. While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of open science abundantly clear, the struggle to achieve this goal (not just for science but for all research) has been mired in a lack of clarity and urgency for over 20 years now, mostly stalling on the tension between wanting more openness but lacking realistic solutions for making this happen on a large scale with so many different stakeholders, needs and perspectives involved.

Underlying this tension is a fundamental difference in philosophy: whether the entire scholarly communication marketplace, driven by the needs and desires of researchers, should determine what kind of open it wants and needs; or whether this marketplace should be compelled to adopt open reform measures developed primarily by the scholarly communication system's main billpayers-funders and libraries. There is no widespread difference of opinion in the community whether open is worth pursuing. The debate is mostly over what specific open solutions are best, and at what pace open reforms should occur.

OSI has proposed a plan of action for working together to rebuild the future of scholarly communication on strong, common ground foundation. This plan – which we're referring to as Plan A – calls for joint action on studies, scholarly communication infrastructure improvement, and open outreach/education. Plan A also calls for working together with UNESCO to develop a unified global roadmap for the future of open, and for striving to ensure the community's work in this space is researcher-focused, collaborative, connected (addressing connected issues like peer review), diverse and flexible (no one-size-fits-all solutions), and beneficial to research. UNESCO's goal is to finish its roadmap proposal by early 2022.

For a full discussion of OSI's common ground recommendations, please see the Plan A website at http://plan-a.world.

The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has changed the way people operate. All sectors of the economy have been affected by this technological advancement. However, little is known of how 4IR technologies are used in Africa. This paper aimed to investigate how 4IR technologies can be harnessed to support sustainable development in Africa. The objectives of the study were to: examine the infometric patterns of research production on 4IR technologies for sustainable development in Africa; explore the perception of 4IR technologies and their potential for sustainable development in Africa; investigate the extent to which 4IR technologies have been harnessed to support sustainable development in Africa; determine the factors influencing the use of 4IR technologies for sustainable development in Africa; and identify the strategies which can be used to harness 4IR technologies for sustainable development in Africa.

The study applied a mixed methods research approach. Quantitative data was collected through bibliometrics analysis while qualitative data was collected by use of systematic literature review. Data was collected from Google Scholar using Harzing's “Publish or Perish” software and analysed using Microsoft Excel, Notepad, VOSviewer and Atlas.ti and presented using tables, graphs and figures.

The study retrieved 914 research publications on 4IR and sustainable development in Africa. It emerged that production of research on the subject has increased gradually over the years. The findings reveal that Africa is aware of the potential of 4IR for sustainable development. In fact, it emerged that 4IR technologies are being used to support education, health services, tourism, e-commerce, records integrity and project management. Some of the factors that inhibit the use of 4IR for sustainable development Africa include lack of relevant policies, low skill levels in 4IR technologies, inadequate infrastructure and lack of stakeholder involvement. This study recommends the development of policies in 4IR, capacity building and upgrading of infrastructures. The findings can be used by governments in Africa to harness 4IR technologies for sustainable development.

The research is original in scope and coverage.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

This study aims to refine the concept of value applied to value co-creation (VCC) by adding religious values. The concept of religious value co-creation (RVCC) is offered because the concepts of value and VCC that have been explored by previous researchers have not touched transcendental values or divine values. So far, the concept of value and VCC onlyfocused on transactional motives with worldly goals but had not succeeded in fulfilling religious needs. The literature review on the concept of value and VCC was carried out from 1990 to 2020, especially regarding the dimension of value creation.

A qualitative method was used to review articles related to the purpose of this study. Harzing’s Publish or Perish application is used to filter relevant articles as data sources. The selected articles only involved databased from Scopus (97 articles) and Google Scholar (115 articles). After going through a rigorous selection, seven articles were successfully analyzed.

The results of the analysis show that the concept of value only emphasizes business values and does not yet have religious values, especially Islamic values.

Future studies can be developed by examining the relationship between RVCC and its antecedent and consequence variables.

This study fills the theoretical gap and provides new insight into the concept of value, especially VCC by adding religious values. This research contributes to the development of the concept of value and VCC so that the two concepts become more holistic. Religious value is urgent to be considered, especially when the organization offers products based on religion and becomes one of the uniqueness that is not easily imitated. This uniqueness is believed to be able to bring about strong differentiation through superior values that have touched the level of non-transactional motives. For organizations that offer products with a religious basis, this differentiation is urgent to create.

The competition in the academe has always been tough, but today, the academe seems to be more like an industry than an academic community as academics are evaluated through quantified and economic means.

This article leans on Heidegger’s thoughts on the essence of technology and his ontological view on being to show the dangers that lie in this quantification of researchers and research.

Despite the benefits that information systems (ISs) offer to people and research, it seems that technology has made it possible to objectify researchers and research. This has a negative impact on the academe and should thus be looked into especially by the IS field, which should note the problems that exist in its core. This phenomenon of quantified academics is clearly visible at academic quantification sites, where academics are evaluated using metrics that count their output. It seems that the essence of technology has disturbed the way research is valued by emphasising its quantifiable aspects. The study claims that it is important to look for other ways to evaluate researchers rather than trying to maximise research production, which has led to the flooding of articles that few have the time or interest to read.

This paper offers new insights into the current phenomenon of quantification of academics and underlines the need for critical changes if in order to achieve the academic culture that is desirable for future academics.

This paper aims to identify specific challenges and opportunities when crafting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research. In addition, it offers potential remedies to frequent challenges when conducting such reviews.

This piece is based on recent methodological advice on conducting literature reviews and my own experience when conducting and publishing reviews that primarily cover qualitative accounting research.

The author chart three typical advantages and three typical use cases of literature reviews of qualitative accounting research, as well as the typical process steps and outputs of such reviews. Along with these process steps, The author identifies three overarching specific challenges when conducting such reviews and discusses potential remedies. Overall, this paper suggests that literature reviews of qualitative accounting research feature idiosyncratic challenges but offer specific opportunities at the same time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the first to offer advice on the specific challenges and opportunities when conducting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research.

Mixed methods research is useful to enhance theoretical and practical research contributions. However, single methods have predominated much logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) research. This paper presents a review of mixed methods research across ten years in LSCM to determine their usage, identify benefits and inhibitors, and provide suggestions for LSCM researchers to realise the benefits from using mixed methods.

This paper adopts a mixed methods approach through a quantitative analysis of methods used in six leading LSCM journals, an e-mail survey of mixed methods article authors during the review period, and four published case studies that used mixed methods.

Only 144 (ten percent) of all empirical articles were published using mixed methods during the review period. A range of benefits and inhibitors regarding mixed methods adoption were found. Suggestions for LSCM authors include research training in mixed methods use and developing a project-specific research design due to the specificity and complexity associated with mixed methods research.

LSCM is at a critical juncture, shaped by new contexts, themes and challenges, and would benefit from different research approaches and methods. This paper contributes to the LSCM domain through analysing the current state, benefits and inhibitors of mixed methods research in LSCM journals to provide a renewed call to action and guidelines for mixed methods LSCM research, and suggesting research design adaptation to enable agile and resilient research when investigating rapidly changing and complex phenomena.