Does not compute: why I'm proposing a moratorium on academics' use of the term "outputs"

The word "outputs" is now ubiquitous in UK academia, particularly in a REF context that requires authors to think of their publications in such terms. To Kirsten Bell this is jarring, with a term previously more commonly associated with the language of computing or economics, where outputs are measured and monetised, clearly not suitable to academia. It's ultimately ideas that academics trade in, a reality obscured by the concept of “outputs” and its connotations of mechanical production and expulsion. It’s time for a moratorium on the casual use of the term “outputs” amongst academics

What we know about the academic journal landscape reflects global inequalities

Over the past sixty years, there has been an exponential growth in the global scholarly publishing landscape. Mapping or capturing it, however, is a difficult task as dominant databases only cover a small proportion of published journals. Kirsten Bell and David Mills offer their own cartographic visualisation of the global scholarly publishing landscape. They argue that the little that is known about scholarly production outside the English-speaking world is revealing about the inequalities of dominant knowledge practices. Moreover, what we do know- the characterisations of non-Western publishers as ‘predatory’- is a conceit which reaffirms colonial hierarchies. They urge readers to explore whole ‘unknown’ publishing continents: non-indexed publications, non-English journals, and non-mainstream journals

More journal standards and their stories

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All gates lead to smoking: The ‘gateway theory’, e-cigarettes and the remaking of nicotine

The idea that drug use in 'softer' forms leads to 'harder' drug use lies at the heart of the gateway theory, one of the most influential models of drug use of the twentieth century. Although hotly contested, the notion of the 'gateway drug' continues to rear its head in discussions of drug use-most recently in the context of electronic cigarettes. Based on a critical reading of a range of texts, including scholarly literature and media reports, we explore the history and gestation of the gateway theory, highlighting the ways in which intersections between academic, media and popular accounts actively produced the concept. Arguing that the theory has been critical in maintaining the distinction between 'soft' and 'hard' drugs, we turn to its distinctive iteration in the context of debates about e-cigarettes. We show that the notion of the 'gateway' has been transformed from a descriptive to a predictive model, one in which nicotine is constituted as simultaneously 'soft' and 'hard'-as both relatively innocuous and incontrovertibly harmful