Background Peer reviewed research is paramount to the advancement of science. Ideally, the peer review process is an unbiased, fair assessment of the scientific merit and credibility of a study; however, well-documented biases arise in all methods of peer review. Systemic biases have been shown to directly impact the outcomes of peer review, yet little is known about the downstream impacts of unprofessional reviewer comments that are shared with authors. Methods In an anonymous survey of international participants in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, we investigated the pervasiveness and author perceptions of long-term implications of receiving of unprofessional comments. Specifically, we assessed authors’ perceptions of scientific aptitude, productivity, and career trajectory after receiving an unprofessional peer review. Results We show that survey respondents across four intersecting categories of gender and race/ethnicity received unprofessional peer review comments equally. However, traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM fields were most likely to perceive negative impacts on scientific aptitude, productivity, and career advancement after receiving an unprofessional peer review. Discussion Studies show that a negative perception of aptitude leads to lowered self-confidence, short-term disruptions in success and productivity and delays in career advancement. Therefore, our results indicate that unprofessional reviews likely have and will continue to perpetuate the gap in STEM fields for traditionally underrepresented groups in the sciences.
Presentation give at Beyond the Horizon (19/05/2025)
*Getting it 'Just Right' Making information literacy teaching more inclusive: an academic librarian’s reflections* Shazia Arif - Academic Liaison Librarian Brunel, University of London
*Abstract* I will be sharing my reflections on developing information literacy sessions for Healthcare Assistants enrolled on the Nursing Apprenticeship foundation programme at Brunel. I identified Christina Bruce's 'informed learning' approach to teaching information literacy as best suited to help me understand the needs of this group and also their prior information seeking behaviours and experiences. This interpretation from Bruce's work added an interesting dimension to my understanding of information literacy. It acknowledges the significance of people’s experiences with information in varied contexts, highlighting how these interactions shape learning within diverse communities.
Rather than merely honing in on the technical skills or personal attributes related to information use, this perspective emphasises the nuanced ways in which different groups engage with, interpret, and utilise information. This includes contexts like digital environments, faith-based communities, and ethnic groups, offering a richer and more inclusive view of information literacy.
Thus, informed learning is simultaneously about information use and learning. The goal was to enable students to experience information literacy in a richer way, by moving away from a focus on locating information sources to one of information use in the construction of knowledge. This perspective encouraged me to see information use not as a static skill but as a dynamic and evolving process that is integral to our development and learning in different contexts.
Why do proportionally more young people from ethnic minorities go to university, but proportionally less of them get first class degrees? Paul Martin has done the research.
Launched by staff at Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London it seeks to create a network and provide free access to resources to understand legacies of coloniality and knowledge production. These include policies, Eurocentric attitudes and histories of health in the British empire.
Shanawdithit was a woman who bore witness to the death of her world in the early nineteenth century, creating the only first-hand account we have of the Beothuk people from the Island of Newfoundland. This lecture seeks to narrate the history of her fascinating and important life, alongside the history of her island, which was England’s first transatlantic colony. It will illuminate the profound connections between the hyper-extraction of the island’s resources, the hyper-exploitation of its settlers, and the violent and totalizing dispossession of Shanawdithit’s people.
In 2021, Barbados became a republic. It was the first independent Caribbean country to make the transition from monarchy to republic since Trinidad and Tobago in 1976 (Dominica had become independent as a republic in 1978). Despite expectations that the example of Barbados might lead to other Caribbean countries making a similar constitutional journey, none has yet followed and there remain eight so-called ‘Commonwealth Realms’ in the region which retain King Charles III as their sovereign. Why have Caribbean countries been so slow to adopt republican constitutions? Why did most of them become independent Commonwealth Realms in the first place and what are the political and symbolic implications of retaining that status? And what developments are we likely to witness in the next few years? Philip Murphy, author of Monarchy and the End of Empire (2013), will seek to shed light on all these questions in his lecture.
In New Roots 3, We interview Esua Jane Goldsmith who talks about writing her auto-biography, her belonging to Black Power and Women's Rights movements and leadership.
TogetherintheUK is a place where people who have come to the UK to live and work can share their remarkable stories about their journeys upon arriving here.
Stolen Relations seeks to recover stories of Indigenous slavery in the Americas. The website has a database as well as a map, timeline, interviews, and curricular materials.
The research of Anthony Miroborn expressed in the form of a comic to communicate easily complex ideas to a wider audience. Miro is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Miro’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of urban inequality with a particular focus on housing and social class. Information is available in English and German.
At its first session, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) requested the United Nations System produce such a report on the state of the world’s Indigenous Peoples (SOWIP).
This project is led by staff at Coventry University’s Centre for Peace and Security.
Ut has collected materials relating to 19 Black social workers who worked with and supported vulnerable children in care since the 1970s. The website includes their oral history accounts, a timeline of key policies relating to race and social care. Plus teaching resources the latter include: identity playing cards,
On 14 Feb 2025, CILIP’s Community, Diversity & Equality Group hosted a webinar presented by Ghada Dimashk, an experienced Archivist and Metadata Librarian specializing in Middle Eastern heritage with a focus on preserving and cataloguing cultural heritage of Lebanon and Palestine. “The fight against erasure is a critical effort to preserve the identities, narratives,
Diversity and inclusivity in clinical research, including in clinical trial participation, are essential to ensure that the development of innovative medicines meets the needs of patient populations.
This paper evaluates the performance of six open-weight LLMs (llama3-8b, llama3.1-8b, gemma2-9b, mixtral-8x7b, llama3-70b, llama3.1-70b) in recommending experts in physics across five tasks: top-k experts by field, influential scientists by discipline, epoch, seniority, and scholar counterparts. The evaluation examines consistency, factuality, and biases related to gender, ethnicity, academic popularity, and scholar similarity. Using ground-truth data from the American Physical Society and OpenAlex, we establish scholarly benchmarks by comparing model outputs to real-world academic records. Our analysis reveals inconsistencies and biases across all models. mixtral-8x7b produces the most stable outputs, while llama3.1-70b shows the highest variability. Many models exhibit duplication, and some, particularly gemma2-9b and llama3.1-8b, struggle with formatting errors. LLMs generally recommend real scientists, but accuracy drops in field-, epoch-, and seniority-specific queries, consistently favoring senior scholars. Representation biases persist, replicating gender imbalances (reflecting male predominance), under-representing Asian scientists, and over-representing White scholars. Despite some diversity in institutional and collaboration networks, models favor highly cited and productive scholars, reinforcing the rich-getricher effect while offering limited geographical representation. These findings highlight the need to improve LLMs for more reliable and equitable scholarly recommendations.
Digital treatment of African cultural heritage: Shifting landmarks and implications for copyright exceptions for archives
Series: Material Digital Humanities
Speaker: Chijioke Okorie (University of Pretoria) Date: Monday March 24, 2025
This talk examines how copyright law must adapt to facilitate digital treatment of African cultural heritage. It challenges traditional notions of preservation and access, advocating for "agency" as a vital guiding principle for digital treatment. The talk further highlights how this shift empowers institutions and prepares them for future copyright reforms, fostering decolonization and restitution in archival practices.
Chijioke Okorie is Associate Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and the Founding Director/Principal Investigator of Data Science Law Lab, a research network that deploys research in law and produces evidence and policy advice to support the growth of data science and AI research across Africa. Chijioke led the development of the Nwulite Obodo Open Data License for sharing African datasets openly and equitably. Chijioke is an Associate Editor of South African Intellectual Property Law Journal, and the author of several articles on intellectual property and innovation law issues in Africa.
The Material Digital Humanities seminar is organised by Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Digital Humanities, University of London, UK) and Chiara Palladino (Department of Classics, Furman University, USA) in 2025. This seminar series will present a range of discussions around materiality and the research possibilities offered by digital methods and approaches. Beyond just the value of digitization and computational research to the study of material culture, we are especially interested in theoretical and digital approaches to the question of materiality itself. We do not restrict ourselves to any period of history or academic discipline, but want to encourage interdisciplinarity and collaborative work, and the valuable exchange of ideas enabled by cross-pollination of languages, areas of history, geography and cultures.
While dialogue and policy on Black children in the UK education system typically focuses on Black boys, there is little research centring the unique experiences of Black girls in British schools. Of the research that exists, we often see a ‘copy and paste’ application of the educational experiences of Black girls in America, where more substantial research exists. The vital differences and visceral nuances of Black girlhood in Britain are neglected in such studies.
This piece of research sits as a corrective. It builds on See Us, Hear Us: On girlhood and growing up Black in Lambeth, a pilot research study commissioned by Milk Honey Bees in 2023, which explored the complexities, nuances and experiences of girlhood whilst living in the London Borough of Lambeth.
This report was written by Njilan Morris-Jarra and Ebinehita Iyere, with research undertaken by 6 peer researchers and co-ordinated by Sophie Arinde. Milk Honey Bees is a creative and expressive safe space for Black girls to flourish and put H.E.R (Healing, Empowerment and Resilience) first.
The NDRP has partnered with the Analysis & Policy Observatory (APO) to build a Disability Research Collection designed to improve policies and practices. The Collection will aim to share evidence and knowledge on a range of topics for people with disability and their families and carers, policy...
A major research study conducted by the Sutton Trust finds that, while free school meal eligibility is linked universally to worse life chances (expressed via education and employment outcomes), the size of this impact varies depending on where you live. In a constituency level analysis this “opportunity index” allows us to see that deprivation has a lower impact in London than in the north, and generally a lower impact in core cities than semi-rural areas or provincial towns.
The study examined the life courses of more than 10 million GCSE candidates in England between 2004 and 2024. The report recommends a number of measures to support attainment and progression to lessen gaps in opportunities, including increasing maintenance support for students and placing stronger regulatory expectations on universities (and employers) to address socio-economic disadvantage in recruitment
Following the election of Donald Trump overseas and a growing backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion, major corporations – including McDonald’s, Meta and Amazon - have scaled back or abandoned their DEI commitments.
Moving to London can be exciting, yet for a child of immigrants can be compounded with the fear of failure and undeniably challenging imposter syndrome. We all experience it to some degree, especially as students, but the good news is that, with a little bit of patience, perseverance, and confidence, you can turn your doubts
Our ReportsBeyond the Cliff EdgeA Roadmap to Sustainability for London's Black-Led OrganisationsBlack-led organisations in London drive social change but remain underfunded and excluded from decision-making.
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