Cross-disciplinary survey of access and assessment criteria of “best paper” awards
Our mission statement: Making “best paper” awards for young researchers more equitable and open. 🌟
(If you are reading this on GitHub, you can also see this repository as a webpage here🌍).
🔖 Background
Research awards can propagate existing biases in academia in terms of rewarding novel results rather than robust and transparent research. They can also contribute to the “Matthew Effect” where already privileged groups become rewarded. As such, revealing which awards do/do not provide equitable access and evaluation can lead to systemic change in how publications, especially these by early career researchers, are assessed and recognised.
🏹 Aims and approach
This project aims to conduct a survey of current practices in awarding “best papers” awards by research journals and other organisations. Such awards are usually given to early career researchers, potentially influencing their futre academic career trajectory. In this project, we will evaluate accessibility, assessment criteria and historical biases in the lists of past awardees. Evaluation will be performed on a sample of awards from most respected journals and organisations across disciplines. Our findings will be openly available and disseminated in the research community.
🪓 Impact
We expect that our findings will contribute to culture change fostering more equitable and open science.
💛 Contributing
We invite early- and mid-career researchers across disciplines to contribute to the project.
Overall:
- We welcome researchers with all backgrounds and walks of life o contribute to any Stage of this project (see below).
- You do not need any speciall research skills - just attention to detail, Internet access and some time available.
- Fill in the Expression Of Interest (EOI) form at: https://forms.gle/J3WPWMTAyWJy3k1v9
- We already had in-person and virual hackathons (information and feedback meetings) in November/December 2022, but we can schedule mor virtual meetings if you feel like you would like to chat with the leaders or other project participants. Send your suggestions!
- We can do all the work asynchroniously online until we complete all Stages of the project (see below).
- For more details on how to contribute and how we deal with recognising everybodys’ contributions see our CONTRIBUTION GUIDE.
- We expect all project contributors to familiarise themselves and follow our CODE OF CONDUCT.
- If you would like to comment on this project or provide suggestions to improve it, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or reach directly to us via a dedicated Slack channel (invites will be sent to project participants who filled in the EOI form: https://forms.gle/J3WPWMTAyWJy3k1v9 or via email (losialagisz@gmail.com).
🗺️ Roadmap
The project has main 4 Stages:
Stage 1: Planning
- Preparing protocol.
- Piloting.
- Registration.
- Feedback on the protocol (we are currently here!).
- Hackathon preparation.
Stage 2: Screening
- Screening journal lists from 27 Scimago Subject Areas rankings.
- Creating award shortlists.
- Checking shortlists.
Stage 3: Data extraction
- Main data extraction for included awards.
- Collecting additional data on past winners.
- Data cross-checking.
- Preliminary analyses.
Stage 4: Analyses and writing
- Final analyses.
- Draft report.
- Contributors feedback.
- Final report.
- Sharing data and code in a GitHub repository.
- Preprint in MetaRxiv.
- Manuscript.
🚉 Current status
Stage 4: Manuscript.
🚀 Protocol
Initial protocol is now publicly archived on OSF at https://osf.io/7ez28. After collecting some feedback, we made some minor adjustements to the protocol before also registering the updated version on OSF.
⏰ Code of Conduct
We expect all project contributors to familiarise themselves and follow our CODE OF CONDUCT.
🔧 Maintainer(s)
🖍️ License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (cc-by).