Auto/biographical research on old Mexican women:a methodological and reflexive account

When it comes to presenting qualitative research in a language other than the participants’ native language the decision-making processes involved are not often fully addressed. Drawing on research with 32 Mexican women aged 60 and over and addressing a significant gap in guidance available to bilingual novice researchers and/or aspiring Ph.D. candidates, this article discusses the complexities of shifting between languages while conducting auto/biographical research. It also explores the researcher’s own positionality as insider/outsider and how these issues impact the research outcomes and knowledge production. It particularly highlights the dual role as researcher and Spanish–English translator and provides details about the methodological decisions undertaken regarding wording selection and interpretation across languages. Ultimately, this article contends that cross-language researchers need to systematically address the unique translation issues involved and make explicit the dilemmas and consequences of moving between languages in which participants’ auto/biographies are analysed, written-up and published.</p

Ageing experiences of old Mexican women

The scarcity of research currently available regarding the individual lived experiences of ageing and old age in Mexico points to our lack of understanding on this subject. Therefore, this thesis aims to advance empirical and theoretical knowledge in social gerontology, particularly in the study of old women. Drawing on a feminist and life course perspective, this thesis explores what it means to be an old woman in 21st century Mexico. The study involved a thematic narrative analysis of data generated by life-story interviews with 32 working and middle-class old women, with an age range of 60 to 89. The analysis shows how old age is both a social construction and a material reality embedded in the women’s cultural, historical and religious locations. Contrary to most current literature on ageing, the analysis also shows how most of these old Mexican women construct ageing and old age as an overall positive experience. Yet, the way they negotiate their ageing identity is not without complexity and ambiguity. On the one hand, they take pride in their age. On the other, they are not immune to utilising ageist discursive practices and attitudes that ironically reinforce old people’s marginalisation. In light of the analysis, the thesis concludes by suggesting an interdisciplinary gerontological approach to the study of the meanings that old women ascribe to their experiences of ageing and old age. First, the focus should be on women’s subjective process of becoming and being old. In other words, the analysis should be based on their personal narratives and the resources they use to construct them. Second, the experience of ageing should be explored from a life course feminist perspective, challenging the dominant negative images of old women, their marginalisation and above all highlighting the positive aspects of their later life. Third, this approach should be combined with the analysis of the female old body, emphasising the diversity and ambivalence of the bodily experiences of ageing. Fourth, social gerontologists should be sensitive to how culture shapes the experience of ageing and old age. Fifth, I argue for opening dialogues regarding the significance of religiosity/spirituality to how old women make sense of their ageing experience and develop strategies for managing their everyday life. Through this line of research, the analysis of ageing and old age could be shifted away from the narrative of decline, recognising old age as the complex and rich process it truly is, full of challenges and opportunities

In which fields are citations indicators of research quality?

Citation counts are widely used as indicators of research quality to support or replace human peer review and for lists of top cited papers, researchers, and institutions. Nevertheless, the extent to which citation counts reflect research quality is not well understood. We report the largest-scale evaluation of the relationship between research quality and citation counts, correlating them for 87,739 journal articles in 34 field-based Units of Assessment (UoAs) from the UK. We show that the two correlate positively in all academic fields examined, from very weak (0.1) to strong (0.5). The highest correlations are in health, life sciences and physical sciences and the lowest are in the arts and humanities. The patterns are similar for the field classification schemes of Scopus and Dimensions.ai. We also show that there is no citation threshold in any field beyond which all articles are excellent quality, so lists of top cited articles are not definitive collections of excellence. Moreover, log transformed citation counts have a close to linear relationship with UK research quality ranked scores that is shallow in some fields but steep in others. In conclusion, whilst appropriately field normalised citations associate positively with research quality in all fields, they never perfectly reflect it, even at very high values

Which international co-authorships produce higher quality journal articles?

International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. Nevertheless, while there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average, perhaps from increased international audiences, there is no science-wide direct academic evidence of a connection between international collaboration and research quality. This article empirically investigates the connection between international collaboration and research quality for the first time, with 148,977 UK-based journal articles with post publication expert review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all Main Panels. The results therefore give the first large scale evidence of the fields in which international co-authorship for articles is usually apparently beneficial. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other high research-expenditure economies generates higher quality research, even when the countries produce lower citation impact journal articles than the United Kingdom. Worryingly, collaborations with lower research-expenditure economies tend to be judged lower quality, possibly through misunderstanding Global South research goals.</p

Are internationally co-authored journal articles better quality? The UK case 2014-2020

International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. In support of this, there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average. Reasons other than the benefits of international collaboration could explain this, however, such as increased national audiences from researcher networks. This article investigates research quality using 148,977 UK-based journal articles with post publication peer review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Based on an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all four Main Panels. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other advanced economies generates higher quality research, even if the countries produce lower citation impact journal articles than the UK. Conversely, collaborations with weaker economies tend to produce lower quality research, as judged by REF assessors. Overall, the results give the first large scale evidence of when international co-authorship for journal articles is beneficial, at least from a UK perspective, and support the continuation of research policies that promote it

In which fields do higher impact journals publish higher quality articles?

The Journal Impact Factor and other indicators that assess the average citation rate of articles in a journal are consulted by many academics and research evaluators, despite initiatives against overreliance on them. Despite this, there is limited evidence about the extent to which journal impact indicators in any field relates to human judgements about the journals or their articles. In response, we compared average citation rates of journals against expert judgements of their articles in all fields of science. We used preliminary quality scores for 96,031 articles published 2014-18 from the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. We show that whilst there is a positive correlation between expert judgements of article quality and average journal impact in all fields of science, it is very weak in many fields and is never strong. The strength of the correlation varies from 0.11 to 0.43 for the 27 broad fields of Scopus. The highest correlation for the 94 Scopus narrow fields with at least 750 articles was only 0.54, for Infectious Diseases, and there was only one negative correlation, for the mixed category Computer Science (all). The results suggest that the average citation impact of a Scopus-indexed journal is never completely irrelevant to the quality of an article, even though it is never a strong indicator of article quality

Why are co-authored academic articles more cited:Higher quality or larger audience?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article due to be published by Wiley in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Collaboration is encouraged because it is believed to improve academic research, supported by indirect evidence in the form of more co-authored articles being more cited. Nevertheless, this might not reflect quality but increased self-citations or the “audience effect”: citations from increased awareness through multiple author networks. We address this with the first science wide investigation into whether author numbers associate with journal article quality, using expert peer quality judgements for 122,331 articles from the 2014-20 UK national assessment. Spearman correlations between authors numbers and quality scores show moderately strong positive associations (0.2-0.4) in the health, life, and physical sciences, but weak or no positive associations in engineering and social sciences, with weak negative/positive or no association in various arts and humanities, and a possible negative association for decision sciences. This gives the first systematic evidence that greater numbers of authors associates with higher quality journal articles in the majority of academia outside the arts and humanities, at least for the UK. Positive associations between team size and citation counts in areas with little association between team size and quality also show that audience effects or other non-quality factors account for the higher citation rates of co-authored articles in some fields.This study was funded by Research England, Scottish Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland as part of the Future Research Assessment Programme (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/future-research-assessment-programme)