Month: August 2012

The University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) has the following vacancy for a PhD student:

The Influence Of Over-Competitiveness On Research

Project Description:

In a world of increasingly scarce resources, researchers compete for funding, people, infrastructure, promotions and publications. The acceptance rates of funding proposals often fall below the 10% mark and conference proclaim a low acceptance rate as an indicator for the quality of the event. Researchers suffer from constant rejections while at the same time being measured against high expectations for their promotions. The review systems in place to judge the proposals or publications create an enormous overhead. Senior researchers often spend more time writing funding proposals and reviewing papers than actually doing research. Young researchers suffer from the lack of funding and career opportunities.

This project tries to gain insight into the consequences that a highly competitive research environment has on the conduct of research. More specifically, we aim to understand what the influence the competitiveness has on the productivity of researchers and the quality of their work.

The project will use social simulation to model the research environment and important factors in it. We will review and extend the Peer-Group-Assessed-Grant-Based-Funding-System to take all the relevant factors into account. We will then run several simulations to examine the influence of competitiveness on the research performed. Next, we will use real world data to verify the model. Last, we will use the model to explore alternative strategies to structure the conduct of science in order to find a stable state in which the true innovative power of science is maximized. Continue reading “PhD position: The Influence Of Over-Competitiveness On Research”