Dimity Stephen (DZHW) und Meta Cramer (RMZ, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

The recent shift in evaluation systems to more diverse quality criteria has increased the visibility of lower quality research, incurring a moral panic about the effects of predatory publishing practices (PPP) on the science system. However, this concern currently lacks empirical substantiation and ignores the complex geopolitical relations, researchers’ motivations, and centre-periphery narrative inherent in the predatory publishing debate. Thus, we propose a mixed-methods approach to answering three questions: i) how have (P)PP in different national settings emerged, ii) how do academic communities define and react to PPPs, and iii) how do evaluation systems influence (P)PPs? Our aim is to elucidate the relationship between evaluation systems and (P)PPs, accounting for the contextual processes of labelling practices as questionable. Our approach combines systematic review, quantitative and bibliometric methods to identify (changing) publishing practices associated with evaluation systems, together with qualitative methods to understand the motivations for these practices in six national systems: Germany, Poland, Portugal, Nigeria, India, and Brazil. In this session, we will present the aims of this project, which began in September 2024, and the methodologies to be used in it.

*recorded and presented on 08.01.2025

Georgia Samaras (Technische Universität München)

The talk explores the epistemic dynamics catalysed by researchers advocating for the clinical relevance of environmental epigenetics in psychiatry. I do so based on an in-depth literature analysis of peer-reviewed research articles and interviews with researchers who conduct epigenetic research in psychiatry. In demonstrating how relevance builds a crucial yet ambivalent bridge between basic research and clinical application, I explore tensions arising in relation to the acceptable level of uncertainty for epigenetic knowledge to be considered relevant. I further trace how epigeneticists aim to counteract emerging problems to their claims about the clinical relevance of epigenetics through performing interdisciplinary, big-data research. Finally, I show that, nonetheless, certain epistemic problems persist and discuss both their roots in the specific epistemic history of psychiatric epigenetics as well as in the systemic pressures to promote relevance early on in emergent research fields. With this talk, I contribute to STS scholarship that explores how modes of relevance feature in different scientific domains. At the same time, my talk contributes to a better understanding of how environmental epigenetics is adopted and adapted in different research fields within biomedicine and how field-specific norms, infrastructures, and societal expectations affect its uptake, articulation, and epistemic development.

*recorded and presented on 11.12.2024

Sven Arend Ulpts (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Research guidelines and the scientific literature in general are full of ideas and recommendations of how proper science should look like. However, it remains an open question how the actual reality of research in the sciences relates to notions of proper or responsible science in, for instance, European research integrity guidelines? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnography of cognitive sciences in five cognitive science labs in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The aim is to understand how and under what conditions knowledge is produced and whether ideas of proper conduct that can be found in guidelines and the literature actually have a place in research reality. Hence, it is about capturing the perspectives of the researchers who are supposed to live in compliance with such guidelines and recommendations. To this end I further inquired what researchers think about how and whether current recommendations for the improvement of science fit into their everyday lives as researchers by conducting semi-structured interviews. Put shortly, I observed a complex mixture of alignment and mismatch between notions of good science and the research realities.

*recorded and presented on 13.11.2024

Thomas Wahl (Mälardalens Universitet, Sweden)