African Universities Face a Looming Shortage of Ph.D.'s

Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Nov, 2008

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The recruitment and retention of new faculty members has emerged as a top priority for institutions across the continent, as they have scrambled to hire enough faculty members to keep pace with recent rapid growth in enrollment. Many African institutions are staffed disproportionately by academics in their 50s and nearing retirement, on the one hand, and by younger academics who often lack advanced degrees, on the other, according to participants at the University Leaders' Forum conference, which continues through today in Accra, Ghana...

By MEGAN LINDOW , Chronicle of Higher Education

 

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"Online research is narrowing the range of modern scholarship"

Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Nov, 2008
..."perhaps the greatest boon is the sheer quantity of readily accessible knowledge. Millions of journal articles are available online, enabling scholars to find material they never would have encountered at their university libraries. From classic psychology studies to the most esoteric literary theory, it's all just a few clicks away.

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a "narrowing" effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet's influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost - the opposite of the Internet's promise..." from Boston Globe

Thanks to Marilyn Wilford for this.

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