1. On the Circumstances Conducive to World-class Publications
Rotterdam, 17 June, 2014
On the Circumstances Conducive to
World-class Publications
Pearl A. Dykstra
Seminar “Research Impact and Relevance – How to Publish a World-class Paper”

2. Institutional circumstances: KNAW’s quality assessment
Across all areas of science
Participation in ERiC* en SIAMPI** (focus on
assessment social relevance)
Standard Evaluation Protocol (with VSNU & NWO)
*Evaluating Research in Context
**Social Impact Assessment Methods through the study of Productive Interactions between science and society
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3. Social
sciences
Engineering/
design
Humanities
Different cultures of publishing
For English version of reports: knaw.nl

4. Click to add title Shifting incentive structures
From quantity to quality of publications
Integrity increasingly subject to accountability
Greater emphasis on social relevance
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5. Click to add title Infrastructural circumstances, an example
Quality: achieved by addressing new research
questions
From the start: the NKPS is a multi-actor,
multi-method, panel study on solidarity in family relationships
As opportunities presented themselves:
collaboration NKPS with historians, record linkage, Generations and Gender Programme
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6. 25 dissertations to date

7. Click to add title Individual circumstances: crafting scholarship
Writing is not easy!
Schedule writing time
Review other people’s work
Collaborate with more experienced peers
Prewrite, write, rewrite
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8. Click to add title Wrapping up
World-class publications are a collective enterprise
We all need to be quality watchdogs
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9. A World-Class Paper - I Click to add title
Roscigno, V. J., & Danaher, W. F. (2001). Media and mobilization: The case of radio and southern textile worker insurgency. American Sociological Review, 66, (Available here)
Why world class?
Smart idea to use media technology as the bridge between two partial theories of collective action  (perceptions of opportunity and group identity)
Creative combination of different kinds of existing data (historical data on strikes by textile factory workers, geographic information on the location of radio stations, content of FD Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats, song lyrics)
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10. A World-Class Paper - II
Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., & Kitayama, S. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat  agriculture, Science, 344, (available here)
Why world-class?
Three contrasting theoretical perspectives for why some cultures are more interdependent and others are more independent (modernization, pathogen prevalence, and rice versus wheat cultivation
Excellent data to test the predictions (different regions in China)
Creative measures of interdependence-independence
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