Gone international: a new generation explores the impact of studying, working and volunteering abroad on students’ academic success and career outcomes.

Findings in this year's OIA annual report point to disabled students being placed at a disadvantage to their non-disabled peers. Livia Scott unpicks why legal requirements surrounding disabled students remain hard to meet

Sarah Weston and Hannah Allen spoke to working-class creative arts students, and came away with recommendations for improving inclusivity Sarah Weston and Hannah Allen spoke to working-class creative arts students, and came away with recommendations for improving inclusivity

Are parents intervening more in their children’s higher education – and if so, why? Rachel Brooks looks at paradoxical parenting practices

OpenAlex is a promising open source of scholarly metadata, and competitor to established proprietary sources, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. As OpenAlex provides its data freely and openly, it permits researchers to perform bibliometric studies that can be reproduced in the community without licensing barriers. However, as OpenAlex is a rapidly evolving source and the data contained within is expanding and also quickly changing, the question naturally arises as to the trustworthiness of its data. In this report, we will study the reference coverage and selected metadata within each database and compare them with each other to help address this open question in bibliometrics. In our large-scale study, we demonstrate that, when restricted to a cleaned dataset of 16.8 million recent publications shared by all three databases, OpenAlex has average source reference numbers and internal coverage rates comparable to both Web of Science and Scopus. We further analyse the metadata in OpenAlex, the Web of Science and Scopus by journal, finding a similarity in the distribution of source reference counts in the Web of Science and Scopus as compared to OpenAlex. We also demonstrate that the comparison of other core metadata covered by OpenAlex shows mixed results when broken down by journal, where OpenAlex captures more ORCID identifiers, fewer abstracts and a similar number of Open Access status indicators per article when compared to both the Web of Science and Scopus.

A comparison of different nations’ research funding systems reveals the importance of block grants (like quality-related research funding) and maintaining both discovery and applied research

Jim Dickinson explores new polling that reveals a worsening picture of students' physical and mental health, undermining their academic success

London Economics were commissioned by the National Union of Students and University of the Arts London to model the costs of the existing undergraduate higher education fees and funding regime, and an alternative funding system proposed by the NUS consisting of the reintroduction of maintenance grants for the least well-off students, combined with a ‘stepped […]