The Scholarly Communication Research Group

The SCRG is an interdisciplinary team of scholars based in Poznań, Poland, whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries in research on scholarly communication.

In our work, we address research problems from transdisciplinary perspectives, drawing on classical works in sociology of science, higher education research, social studies of science, evaluation studies, critical university studies, and bibliometrics. We also focus on the questions surrounding multilingual writing for academic purposes from policy and practice perspectives, including how academic literacy is developed and valued across different higher education systems. Finally, we investigate the consequences of quantification, social construction of measurement and assessment procedures in research evaluation on academic labour, issues of the development of science, writing practices, and research systems in the global peripheries.

The group is led by professor Emanuel Kulczycki at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań – one of the largest and the best Polish universities.

Summary of our research:

Dr. Fraud sting operation

In a sting operation involving 360 journals, one in three ‘predatory’ journals approached by a fake, unqualified applicant offered her a position on their editorial board. None of the 120 journals ranked as quality publications, sampled from the Journal Citation Reports ‘whitelist’, did. The authors hope that their study will alert others to the problem of academic journals that do not provide quality control. However, awareness alone is not enough, they say. “Those who reward academics for publishing must make efforts to assess journal quality and to reward only best practices.”

Publication Patterns

Publication patterns in social sciences and humanities are related not only to discipline but also to each country’s cultural and historic heritage. Therefore, internationalization policies in non-English speaking countries should be designed with consideration of current publication patterns. We suggest that the role of national databases, which cover all publication channels important for the SSH, should be increased in research evaluation systems, funding-schemes, and university rankings.

Our research is supported by:

Deklaracja dostępności