This article presents an empirically based typology of researchers’ rationales for choosing a mobility destination and challenges the commonly held assumption that research conditions the primary decision-making criterion. Theoretically informed by a structuration approach, I reconstruct (1) how researchers reflexively monitor, rationalise, and motivate their mobility actions and (2) how these processes relate to contextual settings in terms of individual life course and career perspectives and macro-level factors, e.g. such as the funding and scholarship landscape or unfavourable conditions in source countries. The analysis draws on 16 qualitative interviews and survey data from 1,532 foreign-educated post-doctoral researchers at German Higher Education Institutions. Based on a triangulation approach, I identify five distinct mobility rationales: ‘Consciously focused’, ‘Exiles’, ‘Sojourners’, ‘Opportunity oriented’ and ‘Familistic established’. The typology serves as a heuristic for science and higher education policymakers to design target-group specific measures for attracting researchers and fostering mobility.
This study examines how affective micropublics emerge in TikTok comment sections during the 2025 German federal election campaign. We conceptualize comment sections as digital micropublics: localized but networked arenas in which users enact publicness through affirmation, opposition, and emotional expression. Empirically, the analysis draws on 12,685 videos from 1,274 political accounts, engagement metrics, and more than two million comments, examined through LLM-based topic classification and automated stance and emotion classification. Methodologically, the study shows how LLM-assisted analysis can move beyond content classification to trace how political messages are taken up, emotionally charged, and redirected in audience interaction. Results show that campaign-related content dominates political TikTok, followed by economic issues, democracy and the political system, social policy, and migration. Yet visibility and audience response vary sharply across parties. The AfD combines high posting frequency with strongly supportive and emotionally aligned comment environments, while centrist and governing parties face predominantly critical or mocking responses. Cross-party hostility analysis further reveals asymmetric patterns of animosity, with negative engagement directed toward specific political opponents rather than distributed randomly. The study shows that TikTok functions simultaneously as a space of participatory visibility and affective polarization. Conceptually, it advances digital micropublics as a framework for analyzing how platformed publics form around political content, emotional alignment, and antagonistic relations.
The data presented here derives from the Sustainable Working Conditions in Academia survey (STAIRCASE) on researcher mental health. The survey addresses the ongoing mental health crisis in academia by providing comprehensive, multilevel data on researcher well-being and its structural determinants. We employed a cross-sectional between-participant study design to collect data from 4,296 researchers between September 15, 2023, and August 26, 2024. The sample, which primarily includes researchers based in European countries, has a mean age of 38.1 years (SD = 10.7) and consists of 63.7% female participants. Participants provided data on key mental health outcomes – including depression, anxiety, stress, burnout, and well-being – alongside detailed assessments of working conditions, leadership behavior, and organizational characteristics. The dataset facilitates a holistic, multilevel investigation of academic mental health beyond individual risk factors by including the individual, leadership, institutional, and national context. By enabling analyses across hierarchical levels this dataset provides the necessary evidence to identify systemic drivers of mental (ill) health and inform the development of effective, system-wide strategies for meaningful change in academic work environments.
Abstract Based on data from a large, multidisciplinary survey of researchers at German Universities, we explore how field-level rates of the public sharing and reuse of research data are linked to field-specific epistemic practices. A previous analysis of this data revealed strong field differences in rates of public sharing and reuse of research data (Velden, Tcypina, & Xharavina, 2026). These differences become very pronounced when using a fine-grained field-classification, suggesting that data sharing and data reuse practices are closely linked to how research communities produce knowledge. Here, we examine this hypothesis for 19 selected subfields. We triangulate the measured field-level rates with the science studies literature about field-specific epistemic practices and data sharing. We conclude that epistemic factors, specifically the accessibility of empirical objects and the (perceived) analytic potential of research data produced, are key factors for explaining differences in data reuse and data sharing within and across fields. Importantly for research policy, our findings suggest that because of the close coupling of data sharing and reuse practices with epistemic practices, differences in epistemic practices need to be accounted for at a rather granular level, when designing open science policies and assessing their success.
Purpose This paper examines the relationship between John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) and the Soviet approach to organize scientific information, focussing on the establishment of the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (VINITI). Design/methodology/approach First, we highlight that the current science of science historiography carries a certain imbalance in acknowledgement of Western and Eastern contributions to the field during the Cold War. Then, we trace how Bernal was generally canonized in Anglophone histories of the science of science and how this canon was subsequently mapped onto and essentialized with the Soviet developments. Additionally, we reconstruct early Soviet initiatives in abstracting, indexing and information policy, highlighting the importance of the existing local scientific culture for future organizational innovations. Eventually, we engage with the archival materials from the Cambridge University Library (Bernal Archive) to support our argument in favour of a rather locally emerged approach than externally imposed influence. Findings Drawing on the newly consulted materials from the Cambridge “Bernal Archive”, we argue that the idea of VINITI and the general Soviet approach to the organization of scientific information may be better understood as the outcome of endogenous Soviet trajectories that emerged as a natural expansion of the Soviet scientific efforts. Originality/value This paper is a systematic attempt to balance the narratives in science of science canonical history to appreciate locally emerged scientific traditions instead of imposing explanation models based on Western external influence.
