Castles and Coprolites

This started as a brief post on an interesting experience, but as I started writing it turned out I had more to say than I thought! As someone with extensive experience in peer review and panel processes, I was really grateful that I recently had the opportunity to observe a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities advisory group meeting. The experience stood out not only for the quality of the discussion but for the integrity and inclusivity of the process itself. The panel was well selected, with deep expertise across disciplines relevant to the proposals under discussion. What impressed me most was the respectful and rigorous way in which feedback was delivered. Criticisms were thoughtful, clearly grounded in the published assessment criteria, and presented in a way that acknowledged the strengths of each application. It was a model of constructive peer review. The diversity of the panel itself was incredibly refreshing. It included researchers from the global South, minority scholars, a...

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the experience of being an academic has changed since I started my PhD back in 2004. I wrote about one aspect of this a couple of weeks ago - the shift that many funders have made from the traditional bullet point CV to narrative résumé s. Related to this, is the attempt to move away from what you might call 'traditional' metrics such as journal impact factors and author citation counts. The journal impact factor refers to the average number of citations received by articles published in a journal over a specific period, typically two years. Author citations track how often a researcher’s work is referenced by others, often aggregated into metrics like the h-index (an h-index of 10 would mean a researcher has 10 papers each cited at least 10 times). These numbers have traditionally been used to assess the "impact" of research, with higher citations meaning greater impact. I am told they influence decisions around hiring...

I recently attended a RICHeS Regional Workshop at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The event was a great opportunity to hear about the latest updates from other RICHeS facilities, and from the AHRC team on the progress of the overall programme. They have been holding these meetings around the UK as a way for different facilities to meet with the user base, and it was a great opportunity to showcase our plans for the North East Material Culture Analytical Suite (NEMCAS) .  One of the highlights for me was catching up with some familiar faces, especially Dr Paddy Gleeson , now Director of the Institute for Heritage and Environmental Science (IHES), the Northern Ireland RICHeS facility at Queen’s University Belfast. Paddy and I were both early career lecturers together at Newcastle many years ago, so it was wonderful to see how his career and the QUB facility have developed, and that we have both moved towards heritage science. The scale of the QUB RICHeS fac...