Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

» via The New York Times

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

» via The New York Times

Universities are more likely to get funding for research when investments in University libraries is high, according to a new report released today. The study was funded by Elsevier, a publisher often employed by University libraries (which raises questions about the efficacy of the report, more on that in a moment). But if the findings are correct, it means the Universities that can’t invest in libraries in the first place, and need grants the most, can’t get them.

» via Fast Company

Hargittai, Fullerton, Menchen-Trevino and Thomas (2010) investigated how young adults at a US university look for and evaluate online content. They found that the students they studied displayed an inordinate level of trust in search engine brand as a measure of credibility: “Over a quarter of the respondents mentioned that they chose a Web site because the search engine had returned that site as the first result suggesting considerable trust in these services. In some cases, the respondent regarded the search engine as the relevant entity for which to evaluate trustworthiness, rather than the Web site that contained the information.” Only 10% of the students bothered to verify the site author’s credentials: “These findings suggest that students’ level of faith in their search engine of choice is so high they do not feel the need to verify for themselves who authored the pages they view or what their qualifications might be.”

» via Net Gen Skeptic

Where would psychology be without lab rats—by which I mean American undergraduates? These human guinea pigs have spent hours in psych labs staring at optical illusions to reveal how the human visual system is wired. They have taken tests that reveal the need for a positive self-image—“an urge so deeply human,” a psychologist said, “we can hardly imagine its absence”—and that demonstrate the “fundamental attribution error,” in which people explain behavior by temperament (“she’s screaming because she’s an angry person”) rather than situation (her kid just fingerpainted the bedroom wall).

My repeated use of the word “human” above is deliberate. When psychologists discover something in lab experiments, the findings often make their way into journals, textbooks, and popular lore as aspects of human nature: universal and the result of evolution. While some scientists voice skepticism that a discovery about college sophomores applies to, say, Tsimane tribesmen of Amazonia, all too many findings are cast as illuminating The Human Mind.

Now such skepticism is backed up by more than a hunch. Three psychology researchers have done a systematic search of experiments with subjects other than American undergrads, who made up two thirds of the subjects in all U.S. psych studies. From basics such as visual perception to behaviors and beliefs about fairness, cooperation, and the self, U.S. undergrads are totally unrepresentative, Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia and colleagues explain in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. They share responses with subjects from societies that are also Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD), but not with humanity at large.

» via Newsweek

Some of today’s children will grow up to be Presidents, artistic luminaries and notorious criminals. A century from now, long after they have completed their noteworthy deeds, historians and biographers will attempt to document their lives and times. And thanks to the shift from written to digital records, those scholars of a future past will face a challenge very different from the job of contemporary academics.

Through Twitter, Facebook and email, a child in 2010 will, over their life, produce a body of writing that dwarfs the collected output of even the most prolific Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This volume will shift the problems of historical research from the archeological recovery of rare texts and letters to the process of sifting through vast fields of digital information that weave through legal gray areas of corporate and private ownership.

“The problem we are going to face isn’t the loss of literacy, or the end of electricity, but having too much information,” said John Unsworth, dean of the University of Illinois’ Library School. “It’s the abundance problem, not the scarcity problem, that we should be focused on. There’s very little that isn’t recorded [these days]. The big problem we’re going to have is ‘I know it’s in there somewhere, but where is it?’”

» via Live Science

Think of it as Oprah’s Book Club for scholars.

Academics may cringe at the comparison, but that is essentially the idea behind the Oxford Bibliographies Online: Someone you trust telling you what, among endless options, you should read — in classics, criminology, Islamic studies, social work, or any of the other 50 areas of study the Oxford University Press plans to add to the new online reference guide by the end of 2015.

That makes Oxford Bibliographies Online, or OBO, the most ambitious project of its kind. And depending on where you’re sitting, it could be either a boon for scholars struggling to navigate an impossibly large sea of potential sources, or a vehicle for entrenching scholarship in the status quo.

» via Inside Higher Ed

A “publish or perish” culture in which scientific careers rely on the volume of citations is distorting the results of research, a new study suggests.

An analysis by Daniele Fanelli, of the University of Edinburgh, finds that researchers report more “positive” results for their experiments in US states where academics publish more frequently.

He cites earlier research suggesting that papers are more likely to be accepted by journals if they report positive results that support an experimental hypothesis, producing a bias against “negative” results.

» via Times Higher Education

If libraries do not seriously rethink their role in the lives of researchers, they could come to be seen as resource purchasers more than as research collaborators, according to a report released today by the nonprofit group Ithaka S+R.

“As scholars have grown better able to reach needed materials directly online, the library has been increasingly disintermediated from research processes,” write the authors of the report, which is based on a national survey of professors administered last year.

“The declining visibility and importance of traditional roles for the library and librarian may lead to the faculty primarily perceiving the library as a budget line, rather than an active intellectual partner,” they later add.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Even as a lawsuit over Google’s book-digitization project remains up in the air, the search giant has quietly started reaching out to universities in search of humanities scholars who are ready to roll up their sleeves and hit the virtual stacks.

The company is creating a “collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus,” according to a call for proposals obtained by The Chronicle. Some of Google’s academic partners say the grant program marks the company’s first formal foray into supporting humanities text-mining research.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

A new survey has found that many communications scholars lack confidence in their knowledge of copyright laws in relation to their research.

On Thursday, American University’s Center for Social Media and the International Communication Association released a survey of ICA members titled “Clipping Our Own Wings: Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research.” The e-mail survey—to which about 8 percent of ICA members, or 387, responded—found that nearly half of all communications scholars were not confident about their knowledge of copyright laws. The survey also found that nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions because of that lack of knowledge, and a fifth abandoned research that was already under way because of copyright worries.

The report’s authors say that the abandoned research is perhaps the most important part of the study because it results in unrealized work and “self censorship” among scholars.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)