The Australian Research Council has been testing out a framework called the Excellence in Research for Australia, or ERA, as way to measure the quality of research in all disciplines. ERA includes journal rankings, assigning each journal a rank of A*, A, B, or C. Some scholars and journal editors in the social sciences and humanities say the rankings don't reflect the quality of their work, and worry that the rankings are being misused as a way to measure individual scholars' output. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »
Journalism
“In Jefferson Lecture, Drew Faust Traces the Fascination of War, From Homer to Bin Laden”
War is hell--and it's a helluva story. The Harvard president and Civil War historian explained why at the 2011 Jefferson Lecture, the federal government's most prestigious award in recognition of intellectual achievement in the humanities. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education »
“In Electric Discovery, Scholar Finds Trove of Walt Whitman Documents in National Archives”
Ken Price, a scholar at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, has turned up thousands of documents Walt Whitman copied and worked on as a clerk in the attorney general's office in the 1860s. And people say government work isn't poetic. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education »
“Hot Type: Despite Warnings, Biomedical Scholars Cite Hundreds of Retracted Papers”
Advice for authors (in any field): Always check your sources. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »
“Shelving Made Easy (or Easier)”
A Miami University computer-science professor has created an augmented-reality app that allows library workers to scan a shelf's worth of books and quickly figure out which ones are misshelved. Will it save enough time and drudgery to catch on? Read More at Wired Campus (CHE) »
