In the push-and-pull between open access (OA) publishing models and that of traditional scientific journals, OA should not strive to prove it is as good as the latter; it can be better, and social media tools can give it that competitive edge, say researchers and OA advocates Melissa Terras, Co-Director of the University College London Centre for Digital Humanities, and Curt Rice, Pro Rector for Research at Norway’s University of Tromsø. Through tweets and blog posts and rich, online debate, we can maximize the benefits of OA for researchers, the journals that publish their work, and for society at large.

“In competition, being as good as your opponent gets you nowhere. You have to be better.” Curt Rice sounds like a coach giving a pre-game pep talk to his team, but the Pro Rector for Research at the University of Tromsø (Norway) and Head of the Board for the national organization Current Research Information System in Norway, is talking

about publishing science in open access. “Some still think that open access publications have problems of quality control,” as if the term “open” meant anyone can publish anything they like. “A lot of discussion has been to tell researchers that the quality control of open access is as good as in the traditional publication system.”

But this, says Rice, is missing the point. What OA advocates should be talking about is developing a system that takes the core goals of scientific publication – critique by expert colleagues and transmission of results to a variety of users – and does them better. How can open access outperform its tenacious, institutionalized competition, the traditional top-tier journals? Perhaps through its intimate relationship with social media. Blogging, tweeting, publicly discussing research can have benefits for scientists, journals, and even society, through the increased debate and transparency that it brings.

Tweet your research and it will be seen

This potential for Twitter and the blogosphere to strengthen open access, is what Digital Humanities researcher Melissa Terras hoped to show with an experiment she started in October 2011. Her project to promote her research articles via Twitter (@melissaterras) and blog postsmade clear the concrete benefits for the scholar, specifically, of pairing open access and social media.

Read these arguments and the entirety of this article on MyScienceWork.com.

In case you found this via a search engine, let me offer the spoiler right away: This isn’t a blog entry with sex pointers for male nurses and it’s not a discussion about giving points for sex, either. Sorry, folks.

Instead, it’s a blog entry about an affirmative action measure in Norwegian universities and colleges whereby extra points can be given to applicants on the basis of their sex alone.

Sex points for engineers and veterinarians
Admission to some programs is based on a point system, reflecting grades from secondary school, subjects from secondary school, age, work experience, and other factors the government deems worthy of reward.

Already today, the law allows for one or two extra points to be awarded to the under-represented sex in study programs where there is a significant imbalance. And these are in use. For example, the admissions process for several engineering programs gives extra points to women, while veterinary sciences give extra points go to men.

Sex points in the news
Sex points have been in the news, as both the University of Oslo and the national Gender Balance in Research committee have recently addressed the issue. At UoO, they were focused on psychology and orthodontics. The gender balance committee was concerned about nursing. UoO decided against using sex points, suggesting that focused recruiting was important, but that sex points should not be used.

The gender balance committee took a different position. When men apply to nursing programs, they should be given extra points — just because they’re men. More generally, the committee proposes that sex points should be used to facilitate improvement in programs where one gender constitutes fewer than 30% of the students, regardless of whether it is men or women. Their fundamental perspective comes through in the following quote.

Gender balance will improve the quality of the educational programs and contribute positively to the further development of the relevant fields; the development and qualifications of all students are thereby strengthened.

Arguing for sex points
The committee lists five arguments that it considered; the first three argue for sex points, while the last two argue against them.

1. The argument from quality: Gender balance in the student population positively affects educational quality. If both sexes have an opportunity to influence educational programs, the quality of the content of the programs is strengthened.
2. The argument from role models: Gender balance in the student cohorts positively affects future recruitment and success rates for both young men and women.
3. The argument from societal benefit: From a broader societal perspective, gender balanced student cohorts is important. Just as women should make their mark on the development of technology, men should make their mark in psychology and nursing. Cohorts should in principle reflect the composition of the society from which they are drawn.
4. The argument from fairness: Sex points are unfair because applicants with worse grades are admitted over those with better grades.
5. The argument from meritocracy: Higher education and research are meritocratically oriented. That is, the most meritorious — those with the best grades — should win.

Sex point skepticism
I have no information about the committee’s deliberations but offer my own comments on these arguments here, as a contribution to the debate.

The connection between quality and equality is crucial for motivating further gender equality work, and from that perspective, the argument from quality is important. However, the claims the committee makes need a stronger research foundation to carry the day. On what basis can one claim that gender balance in a cohort improves educational quality?

It seems natural to ask how this claim relates to research on single sex schools or classrooms. The research I’m aware of on single sex classrooms is indecisive, as discussed in a recent debate, although a new study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes that there are significant benefits to segregation.

The arguments from role models and societal benefits are sound. Recruitment of future groups of students surely is affected by the appearance of the current group, and it’s not difficult to convince oneself that patients could have any number of reasons for wanting a male psychologist or nurse, such that reflection of the composition of society in cohorts of students in such fields is important.

Do sex points compromise quality?
The lone argument against sex points — I conflate the arguments from fairness and meritocracy because I don’t understand how they differ — suggests that sex points lead to a compromise of quality. This raises a tricky issue. Do points for girls and boys compromise quality in the same way?

In Norway, girls as a group have higher high school grades than boys in every subject except physical education. Getting more girls into engineering could therefore raise the quality of the cohort.

If increasing the number of girls increases the quality of a student cohort, then increasing the number of boys may lower it — again, on the assumption that high school grades indicate quality.

There are two possible responses to this if one nonetheless wants to advocate the use of sex points. One response is that the arguments about role models and societal benefits are so strong that they justify risking a loss of quality.

The other response is that high school grades are not an appropriate measure of quality. Elaborating briefly, one would have to claim that the structure of the public school system favors girls and in that sense constitutes a structural barrier for boys getting better grades. Using quotas to counteract structural impediments works, as I point out in If you need quality, you need affirmative action. One recent article developing this second response is The war against boys.

The sex point debate
Several issues require engagement here. Are grades the right measure of quality? If so, are you willing to accept lower quality psychologists and nurses in order to get gender balance? If not, what is?

Perhaps the most focused question that requires an answer is whether or not sex points actually make a difference. Are boys not choosing nursing because they don’t have the grades to get in, or is it something else that stops them? Are girls not choosing engineering because they don’t think they can tackle it, or are they perhaps just not interested in the subject the way it’s traditionally taught?

Changing the culture of a field of study in ways that might attract more diverse cohorts of students surely requires much more than affirmative action. I think we agree on that. The remaining question is whether affirmative action makes a difference at all.

Or, to put it another way, would a sex point or two get more guys into nursing? What do you think?

Photo: WorkingNurse

How can a journal editor decide? Are there structures in our publishing system that could be changed in ways that would help?

These are some of the questions raised in the story below. It’s a story about scientific publishing. But the context for the story is commercial whaling — and that makes it more complicated.

A DNA register for whales
Information from Norway’s commercial whale hunt is entered into an official DNA register. Not surprisingly, this presents interesting research possibilities.

Kevin Glover and his colleagues used the DNA data to study whale migration; their conclusions appear in Migration of Antarctic Minke Whales to the Arctic, in the journal PLoS ONE.

Initial publishing attempts
Before publishing with PLoS ONE, Grover inquired about submitting the article to the prestigious journal Biology Letters. He described the research results and noted that they are based on Norwegian and Japanese sources.

A week later, Publishing Editor Fiona Pring sent a terse reply. “After consultation with the editorial board, we feel that Biology Letters should not publish papers that use data from the Japanese or Norwegian whaling programs.”

Censoring?
The correspondence continues, as described in (and available via) Good ethics or political and cultural censoring in science? Ole Torrissen — the first author of this article – took over the correspondence with Biology Letters after Grover’s initial query.

Torrissen proposed publishing a letter to the editor with a discussion of the principled issues but was denied that opportunity because, according to Publishing Editor Charlotte Wray, Biology Letters does not publish, well, letters.

Wray elaborates, noting that the journal limits itself to only a few genres, including “opinion pieces” and “comments.” In the face of this, Torrissen let himself be provoked and replied with an accusation that the journal practices political censorship typical of “authoritarian regimes.”

Our hopes for a collegial solution wane.

Publication ethics
A difference of opinions about the ethicality of commercial whaling is the occasion for this story, but it’s not the heart of it. No, this story is about editors’ ethical standards and how they affect the process of scientific publishing.

Journal editors must call out unethical research when they see it. By doing so, they play a role a keeping scientists ethical.

Researchers and editors must accept formalized ethical standards, such as The European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes or COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

In this story, however, the editors of Biology Letters, don’t appeal to any codified ethical guidelines. And they aren’t consistent in the appeals they do make.

Editor Brian Charlesworth first appeals to “widely held” ethical principles. “Our policy is indeed not to publish research based on whaling programmes. This has nothing to do with politics, as you suggest, but on a widely held view [sic] in the scientific community and beyond that these programmes are unethical.”

When Torrissen presses Charlesworth, the editor changes his story, appealing to the ethical views of one unnamed scientist. Our policy, Charlesworth now claims, “is based on advice from a highly respected marine mammal expert.”

The ethical dilemma
Although it may be widely held that whaling is unethical, it is apparently less widely held that research on whale DNA from a preexisting register is unethical. Indeed, PLoS ONE wasn’t held up by this issue and as a new, open access journal, the editors of PLoS ONE have to be particularly careful about their reputation, even if their impact factor (4.4) is higher than that of Biology Letters (3.7). (Impact factors can be manipulated, as discussed in How journals manipulate the importance of research and one way to fix it.)

Editors differ in their ethical evaluations. Surely that’s no surprise. But is it a problem?

Would Biology Letters publish research based on the DNA of farmed chickens? (Google it.) Would it be acceptable if a vegan editor refused to publish any animal research at all?

We could make up ethical questions all day long, but they all would point to this one: Is it professional for editors to refuse articles on the basis of their personal ethical views, on the basis of their perception of what is a widely held view, or even on the basis of a single expert?

That’s the heart of the matter. An editor thinks some submitted research is unethical and s/he therefore declines to consider it for publication.

What structures in the publishing process could be changed to make a difference?
Even an editor who declines an article on such grounds can see that there is disagreement within the scholarly community. And they know perfectly well that the fallacy of argumentum ad populum is lurking just around the corner.

Maybe there are changes in the system that could help. Maybe a system with different structures could spare individual editors the task of resolving ad hoc ethical dilemmas, without leaving them feeling that they’ve abandoned their principles.

There are at least two relevant developments of late. Let’s debate these two along with your ideas in the comments section below.

New possiblities with internet based publishing
The story I’ve told here is not an argument for open access publishing per se. There is no necessary difference between the editorial procedures of open access journals and traditional ones.

However, open access publishing is often net based, which can facilitate new approaches to reviewing, discussed in greater detail in New approaches to quality control in publishing.

One recent development involves enhanced reviewing. Articles could be put up on a website for discussion prior to publication, as part of the reviewing process. Alternatively, a journal could start with traditional review, but also facilitate post-publication review, garnishing more feedback on the article.

Either of these approaches would put an ethically controversial article in front of the community for debate. The research results would become known, but the methods would also be debated. In the case of enhanced pre-publication review, the editor sees a nuanced discussion before making a decision. With post-publication review, the discussion stays with the article, available for all future readers to see.

The second development involves an enhanced symbiotic relationship between journals and social media. Remember the #arseniclife debate last year? (It’s discussed in Arsenic gives aspiration: Twitter and open access publishing.) In that case, an article was put on a website prior to journal publication. It was heavily debated — on Twitter! And when the article was published, part of the Twitter debate was also published.

Greater use of these developments could help to clarify complicated ethical debates, and they would address both the scientific results and the ethical issues in the methodology. Editors could satisfy their ethical qualms, confident that the issues would receive lively discussion. But scientists would still be able to see the research and to build on the discoveries of their peers.

Ethics and professionalism are in principle not in conflict. Yet well-intentioned and intelligent scientists can disagree. The passions brought to discussions of whaling illustrate this unambiguously.

As a result of debates on ethically challenging topics like whaling, new tools might emerge — tools that can help us get our ethical and professional concerns re-aligned.

For it surely is true, as Herman Melville wrote, that “of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.”

Related post: Opacity in scientific publication: Do journals discriminate?

Photo courtesy of Chris Vees.

During the webinar, you’re going to hear new ways to articulate the career challenges academia presents, and you’re going to hear ideas about changes that could make us better. That’s important, because universities are under tremendous pressure, and there are ways we can perform better without losing our souls.

I’ll be presenting research about people who leave academia, and I’ll be talking some about the reasons they most often cite. We’ll look at a few of those closely. Young men and women are leaving us, but they leave for different reasons, so we’ll tease some of that apart.

But we won’t look at just the problems. I’m going to present some research, too, on how things might be better. I’ll tell you about a project I’ve been part of (along with colleagues in Tromsø and at The Performance Group) in which we talked with people leading so-called Centers of Excellence here in Norway. We asked them what kind of leadership they use, and what they think is necessary in universities. The results are strong, clear and interesting!

I speak widely on how to build an academic career at a university, describing the current situation as I see it, and offering proposals about how to become better. I’d like to share some of these thoughts with you and to hear your experiences and reactions.

To achieve that, I’ll be hosting a one-hour free webinar on May 23rd, entitled “Skinny dipping with snapping turtles: Careers in academia.”

To listen to this talk, to see the slides, and to have the opportunity to send in “live” questions, you need to sign up for the webinar. Doing so gets you a unique access code that you’ll use to log in to the event.

If you know someone else who might enjoy attending this event, I’ll be grateful if you pass this along to them.

Time zones: The webinar will happen once, so I’ve tried to pick a time that works across time zones. (I know it’s bad for the Aussies, but maybe we can do it another time?)

The time on May 23rd for the event is:

19:00 (7:00 p.m.) Central European Time (Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris)
which is the same as:
18:00 (6:00 p.m.) in Great Britain,
13:00 (1:00 p.m.) Eastern, in North America (Boston, New York, Washington DC)

Information about logging in will come to you when you sign up. Join me and contribute as we work together on this important issue!

Image: Nick Brennan

Rector (President) Tom Colbjørnsen of the BI Norwegian Business School takes this position in a recent op-ed piece in the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv, firing a flaming salvo across the bow of the Norwegian gender equality superliner.

Part of the explanation he sees for the increase in women leaders is that punishment for discrimination is now much more severe. Fewer men therefore engage in discrimination, and more jobs are thereby available for women, as he puts it.

But this cannot be the primary reason for the change, Colbjørnsen argues. The recruitment of candidates for leadership positions has not shown any “inappropriate bypassing” of women, he claims, before asserting that “male and female managers have more or less equal opportunities for promotion once they’ve started their leadership career.”

President Colbjørnsen obviously hasn’t been reading my blog.

Discrimination is not about men explicitly deciding not to hire women. It’s about subconscious decisions and distinctions. In psychological studies, otherwise identical files are evaluated differently depending on whether the name at the top is that of a man or a woman. If you add to the profile that the woman is a mother, the applicant is held to a higher standard than men or women without children — and let’s not get started on the career benefits that accrue to men with children. From my perspective, this is “inappropriate bypassing” in the hiring and promotion process.

As for the assertion of equal opportunities for promotion, the most recent Women Matter report from McKinsey&Company is instructive. On the basis of research in 235 European companies, McKinsey concludes that men in middle management are 1.8 times more likely to be promoted than their female counterparts. At the Vice President level, the difference is about the same. But from the next highest level to the level of CEO, men are fully five times more likely than women to be promoted. And even in Norway, there are significant differences in promotion rates.

In addition to his rather dubious core claims, Colbjørnsen rounds off his op-ed article with a series of comments so odd that they are best left to speak for themselves. Keep in mind that the context is why women haven’t made it to the top until recently.

“Leadership [involves] working through one’s colleagues. It requires relationship skills, the ability to communicate clear expectations and the ability to involve colleagues without abdicating responsibility. A leader must learn ‘how we do things here,’ not necessarily to preserve it, but to handle it competently. In that context they have to understand how much they can lead from above and how much they can and should delegate. They must know their own limitations and understand where they fall short such that others should be given responsibility. This cannot be learned in the classroom. It requires practical experience and personal maturation.

“For this reason, it is both natural and right that the percentage of women managers has only recently started to grow. The large numbers of women who finished degrees [in business] in the 1990s have needed these years to become qualified.”

Rather than starting a discussion about how slow women are to acquire relationship skills or the awareness of their own limitations, I ended my reply in the newspaper by challenging Colbjørnsen to host a meeting at the BI Norwegian Business School, bringing in international experts so that we could all learn more about this topic.

Here, I’ll close instead by offering the President’s comments as a reminder that even in the calm waters of Scandinavia, a ship’s ballast can be out of place.

[UPDATE: Dagens Næringsliv published my letter on April 24, 2012 in edited form; the challenge at the end, referred to above, was a victim of the red pen.]

Photo: norden

Sign up for the webinar

Are you trying to get more women to the top in your organization? Do you wonder how to get more women professors at your university? Here’s your chance to find out how one university is seeing great progress and success.

In Europe, 18% of full professor positions are filled by women. At the University of Tromsø, it’s almost 30%, making us one of the leading institutions in Europe.

It hasn’t always been this way in Tromsø. In 2001, only 9% of our professors were women. But while other universities in Norway have gradually increased, their relative positions have not changed. In our case, we have moved from being worst-in-class to being best.

This progress is the result of many deliberate efforts and, of course, hard work by many people in a variety of positions. The Norwegian government recently recognized our work in this area by awarding us a national gender equality prize.

I speak widely on our success with gender equality and gender balance work, telling about the motivation behind this work and the way we do it. After much encouragement from good colleagues, I’ve decided to do a web-based talk on this topic.

I will host a one-hour free webinar on May 2nd, entitled How to get more women professors. I’ll use about 40 minutes of that hour to present our thinking and to tell about the measures we use, and about 20 minutes will be left for questions and discussion.

To listen to this talk, to see the slides, and to have the opportunity to send in “live” questions, you need to sign up for the webinar. Doing so gets you a unique access code that you’ll use to log in to the event.

I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts about what we’re doing in Tromsø, just as I’m pleased to have the opportunity to tell you how we’ve gotten to 30%, and how we intend to get even further.

If you know someone else who might enjoy attending this event, I’ll be grateful if you pass this along to them.

Time zones: The webinar will happen once, so I’ve tried to pick a time that works across time zones. The time on May 2nd for the event is:

19:00 (7:00 p.m.) Central European Time (Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris)
which is the same as:
18:00 (6:00 p.m.) in Great Britain,
13:00 (1:00 p.m.) Eastern, in North America (Boston, New York, Washington DC)

Information about logging in will come to you when you sign up. Join me and contribute as we work together on this important issue!

Photo courtesy of: peevee@ds

Four factors distinguish companies that succeed in making a breakthrough:

1. The most important is commitment from the top leadership of the organization; they are responsible for expressing goals through strategies and for communicating priorities.
2. The second important factor is measuring the status quo; improving requires knowing where to start and it requires regular monitoring of progress.
3. Pursuit of cultural change is the third factor identifying companies showing a breakthrough. These companies work to specify particular attitudes that create barriers to progress for women and then they implement actions to change those attitudes.
4. Finally, successful companies are able to use specific measures to target particular weak points within the organization. There are different impediments or structural problems at different levels and in different parts of the organization; these require unique and focused measures.

This analysis of companies that make breakthroughs comes from the new McKinsey study — fifth in their series — called Women matter 2012: Making the breakthrough.

Women matter 2012: Making the breakthrough is built on research into 235 companies in eight European countries. Part of the process involved asking employees about their perceptions of their company. 90% report that their CEO is committed to gender diversity, but only 41% find that commitment to be well implemented.

Men and women also differ in their impressions of several other gender-related measures, beyond CEO commitment.

• 64% of women but only 40% of men believe that gender diversity is important for performance.
• 30% of women but fully 65% of men think that their company evaluates men and women equally.

Even those of use who work frequently with gender balance and gender equality issues will find evidence that may compel an adjustment in focus. Three things from this report make me think anew.

1. The factual basis for improvement is naturally important, and one way to emphasize that is through reporting. While vertically oriented reporting paths are the most common, I believe that horizontal ones can be effective, too. If departments report their progress to each other, those who lag will know where to find ideas for improvement. Similarly, if a group of institutions in a network exchanges information about their progress, it may trigger their competitive instincts and contribute to highlighting the issue.
2. Men in organizations need heightened awareness that their female colleagues may have very different views about the effectiveness of the work being done. When more than twice as many men than women think evaluation is gender-neutral, there is a need for closer study and an opportunity for cultural change.
3. We may have targets at the institutional level, and we may even have data from various divisions or faculties or departments within the organization, but more can be done to identify at increasingly local levels the specific challenges and thereby the measures needed to change relatively small groups. In this way, many different kinds of measures become essential for reaching the institutional goals and, again, experiences and skills in implementing measures can be exchanged horizontally.

Related posts: 

Women matter 2012: Making the breakthrough has been discussed on a few other blogs, too. Over at the Odimo blog, Women matter 2012 and several other reports are synthesized in a discussion about the challenges of implementing cultural change, which is also addressed in a posting at Evolved Employer. Politics first connects the McKinsey report to the work of UN Women. The discussion at Moniclansu focuses on the importance of a CEO’s commitment.

My brief presentations of the first four Women matter reports can be found at the following links.

• Women matter: Gender diversity: A corporate performance driver
• Women matter 2: Female leadership: A competitive edge for the future
• Women matter 3: Women leaders: A competitive advantage in and after the crisis
• Women matter 2010: Women at the top of corporations: making it happen

In high-stakes university sports programs in the U.S., there are coaching positions available for men’s teams and for women’s teams. Those positions, however, are not equally available to male and female coaches. In practice, men can coach women, but women cannot coach men. This effectively means there are twice as many jobs available to men as women.

A little over 40% of women’s athletics teams are coached by women, while fewer than 1% of men’s teams are coached by women. These facts and their context are presented in The Glass Wall by Kate Fagan and Luke Cyphers of espnW and ESPN The Magazine.

In basketball, for example, at the biggest and most competitive universities, the glass wall emerges in hiring statistics.

On every Division I campus, there are approximately eight basketball coaching positions: four on the men’s side, four on the women’s. Men can and do apply when any of those become available; inevitably they fill six of them. Women, however, will vie for only four slots — the women’s team slots — and claim two.

Part of the problem, then, is about women not applying for positions, and this is where a broader lesson might be found.

[F]emale candidates believed they needed to meet nine of 10 requirements on a job posting to even apply. For men, it was five out of 10.

This is the kind of claim that emerges when discussing academic positions, too. Men seem to interpret job announcements more liberally than women. And it’s a claim that can feed generalizations about differences in self-confidence between men and women.

Work to improve gender balance — whether in coaching positions or professorships — must take account of these differences. One example is the core of a promotion project at my own university, where we are working to get more women professors.

The project is built around a mock evaluation. Women submit their materials as though they were applying for promotion. An outside expert is engaged to evaluate the material and give specific feedback about what they need to do before they can apply in the actual process. This process is designed to give increased confidence, and it has led several women to apply for promotion.

Women find themselves in a glass box, with ceilings and walls that impede movement. Cultural and sociological norms are part of what hold these boxes together. The work of gender balance involves working to change these norms. It’s demanding work, but we’ll all be better off if we do it.

For a different perspective on ESPN’s story, see the Extracurriculars blog.

Photo courtesy of: nickmilleruk

Journals are ranked by the citation rates of the articles they publish. Editors can manipulate their journal’s ranking by asking authors to include more citations of other articles in that very journal.

An editor of Leukemia wrote to an author whose work was about to be accepted. “You cite Leukemia once in 42 references. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add [more] references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article.”

These data recently appeared in Science, where Allan W. Wilhite and Erica A. Fong dubbed the phenomenon Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing.

While 80% of researchers say that coercive citation reduces the prestige of a journal in their eyes, 60% nonetheless admit that they would add citations from such a journal to their reference list before submitting their article to it.

This practice can be stopped by changing how we calculate a journal’s impact factor. Impact factors reflect average citation rates for articles; a high impact factor shows that a journal is important in its field.

When we determine impact factors, we should simply exclude citations appearing in the journal at hand. If the impact factor of Leukemia were computed without reference lists from articles in Leukemia itself, nothing could be gained from coercive citation.

Would this give a skewed picture of the relative importance of journals? It’s true that curiousity-driven research leads to specialization so narrow that only a few journals would be interested in any particular article. As a result, new findings in some sub-sub-sub-field — which is where researchers work — have very few potential outlets. But this is true for everyone and almost all journals, such that it shouldn’t lead to unreasonably skewed citation indeces.

Another possible fix is advocated by John G. Lynch, also in Science. Lynch organized several editors of leading journals in his field to write a joint letter to 600 deans, identifying the practice of coercive citation and its potential damage to the field. These editors encouraged deans to evaluate the quality of their faculty members’ papers based on the articles themselves rather than the impact factor of the journals in which they appear.

And, indeed, Lynch is right that evaluation and funding cultures provide the context for coercive citation. When promotions are based on publication in journals with high impact factors, the journal editors have a motivation to get the best impact factor they can because that will let them attract the best articles from up-and-coming researchers. There’s an incentive to game the system.

When governments connect funding for universities to the number of publications in different tiers of journals — as the Norwegian government does — the lure of corruption is introduced.

Universities carry out basic research that takes many years. Elected officials operate on shorter cycles; politicians want to give money to research and then see results during their relatively short period in office. The legitimate priorities of universities and politicians are therefore at times in conflict.

Attempts to resolve the conflict — primarily about how long it takes to get results — give rise to systems based on metrics, on counting. And systems based on counting can be gamed.

The game we learned about from Wilhite and Fong — the game of coercive citation — can be fixed. Doing so will strengthen our confidence in the system.

That way, when we have good results, we can try to publish them in the best possible journal, confident that the quality of the journal reflects the quality of the research others have published there, and not just the vastness of their reference lists.

For more recent writing on gaming scholarly publication, check out the DrugMonkey blog at scientopia, a recent post at the scholarly kitchen, and S. Scott Graham’s blog entry on citation coercion.

See also:
Opacity in scientific publication: do journals disciminate?
Breakthrough knowledge: research, education and universities

New research demonstrates that when affirmative action programs are used, the quality of the applicants increases.

Affirmative action is often criticized as giving unfair advantages. Different people are evaluated by different criteria, which inevitably lowers the quality of the selected group, is the claim.

Diversity achieved through intervention is quality-compromising diversity, says the critic.

The logic behind these claims is not hard to understand, but it may be wrong.

Imagine that 100 students are going to be admitted to a university. If the historical trend is that 70 of them are men and 30 of them are women, and if affirmative action is implemented to increase the number of women to 40, the claim of detractors would be that 10 men of higher quality are being left aside to bring in 10 women that otherwise would not have been selected.

One basic problem with this logic that I’ll leave aside here is the dubious assertion that a process resulting in 70 men and 30 women is fair; I’ve discussed that elsewhere, in Equality targets as a leadership tool and in a post I wrote for theglasshammer.com, Engaging CEOs in gender diversity.

There’s a more subtle problem with the claim that affirmative action compromises quality, and two recent articles in Science show that this claim is wrong.

In Ready, Steady, Compete, Marie Claire Villeval focuses on gender differences in competitions. This can be seen in sports, where ‘boys tend to outperform girls when racing against someone else, but not when running alone.‘ In other words, competition changes the relative performance, either enhancing the performance of boys or reducing the performance of girls.

If girls are not motivated by competition — if they in fact avoid it — then reducing competition might have a surprisingly different effect than compromising quality.

What if women — even highly qualified women — opt out when they perceive too much competition? What if reducing competition increases the willingness of women to participate?

When the level of competition is reduced, the hypothesis might go, high-performing women are increasingly likely to enter the competition. When they then win, it need not be at the cost of a higher-performing man; that man might only have won against a weaker pool.

A second Science article tests this hypothesis. In Affirmative action policies promote women and do not harm efficiency in the laboratory, Loukas Balafoutas and Matthias Sutter run 360 subjects through four different repetitions of an addition task, in which they solve as many math problems as they can in three minutes.

The first time they do it, they are rewarded for each correct calculation. The second time they do it, they are groups of six — three men and three women — and only the two best performers are rewarded. The third time they do it, they can choose if they want to do it individually — and be rewarded for each correct answer — or in a competition — and be rewarded more if they are one of two winners. The fourth time they all do it in a competition again, like in the second round.

Affirmative action is introduced in the third and fourth rounds. In the third round, before they choose whether they want to do the task individually or in a competition, the women are divided into five groups and given different information about the competition. In the fourth round, everyone competes, and again there are these five different groups and models.

1. Group one is the control group; their competition is just like that in round 2.
2. Group two has quotas added to the competition: there will be two winners, as in round 2, but one of them must be a women. In practice, this means that the best performing woman will always win, even if that means a better performing man is prevented from winning.
3. Group 3 experiences weak preferential treatment: when a man and a women have the same score, the woman wins, and the equally well performing man may not. (Remember that there are two winners in each group. If a man and a woman tie for best, they both win in Group 3. But if a man and a woman tie for second best, then the woman joins the best performer as one of the two winners.)
4. Group 4 experiences strong preferential treatment: when a woman’s score is just slightly less than a man’s, the woman still wins, and the man may not. (If the man was best and the woman next best, they both still win. If the man came in second and the woman was third, then she will win over him, if her score was very close to his.)
5. Group 5 has a requirement that at least one woman is among the two winners, but the scores are not manipulated. If the result of the competition gives no woman among the winners, then the competition is repeated until one is. (This could be like a requirement to re-do a hiring or promotion process if no women are on the short-list.)

What do we learn from this study?

In the third round, when subjects choose if they want to be rewarded for individual performance or for winning a competition, the number of men choosing competition is twice the number of women doing so in group one, the control group, where there is no affirmative action.

But when there is affirmative action, the number of women choosing to participate in the competition increases; this is most dramatic for the weak and strong preferential treatment seen in groups 3 and 4.

In the control group, with no affirmative action, only 30% of the women chose competition over individual evaluation; with strong preferential treatment, 70% do.

Think about what this means: when they can choose, women are significantly more likely to enter into a competition when the possibility of affirmative action is in place. Not just weaker women; highly qualified women, too.

The impact of affirmative action on the combined talent of the group of winners could go in two directions. Affirmative action could lower the collective talent of the winners if better qualified men are passed over by worse qualified women.

But affirmative action could also increase the overall talent of the group of winners if better qualified women now enter the competition.

These women could then join the group of winners based on their performance alone; the affirmative action measure draws them into the competition, but gender-balanced results in the competition are achieved without actually intervening to change any results.

The large increase in competition entry by strong female performers shows the potential of policy interventions to improve the quality of participants. It is also encouraging to observe that strong male performers do not respond to policy interventions in a negative way.

The research shows that the average ability of the group of winners is higher with some forms of affirmative action. And in this particular study, the authors note that ‘hardly any better-qualified men were passed over as a result of interventions.’ For example, in group 5, where the competition is repeated until there is a woman among the winners, it was in fact never necessary to repeat the competition.

Finally, after the four rounds of doing this task, the group was given a task that measured cooperation. The groups that had completed round four with affirmative action showed no less cooperation than those in the control group, where there was no affirmative action. Furthermore, the winners and losers in the groups with affirmative action did not differ from one another in terms of how cooperative they were either. In short, the presence of affirmative action in a competition within a group did not negatively affect the ability of that group to subsequently perform cooperatively.

The claim that affirmative action, if implemented, necessarily lowers the quality of the selected group, is illogical. Indeed, the evidence from this study makes it clear that affirmative action for women as a policy can raise the overall quality of the winners without being unfair to the men.

What do these results mean for national and local policies? What do they mean for universities? I’d like to know your answers to these questions. I’ll be writing more soon with mine.

Webinar invitation: Skinny dipping with snapping turtles: Careers in academia, May 23rd. Click here to sign up.

Photo courtesy of the Nordic Council of Ministries