Introduction In this blog post I dive into the integration of TikTok as a methodological tool for doing ethnographic research on social media influencers.

Science communication is often considered equal with public relations or media coverage. However, the phenomenon is significantly more complex, and its most important aspects are not given enough attention. For instance, science includes how science can not only communicate but also interact with societal groups, and the potential impacts this can have on the perception of research in the public eye.

What’s the matter? Keeping track of the latest articles published in the leading journals in one’s field of expertise can be challenging. But even if it is impossible to know literally every newly published paper in a field, having an overview of its recent, most prominent research agendas might be both inspiring and helpful to contribute to discussions with fellow scholars or students.

Several universities in the country have been either completely destroyed or damaged. Most recently, the central building of the Taras Shevchenko National University standing in the center of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv suffered from an explosion nearby. At the same time, the interview itself illustrated the dramatic circumstances of this process: the online-talk was disrupted by air raid siren alerts.

Introduction The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global and accelerated digitalisation of all education systems. This quickly revealed many inequalities in access to digital resources and lack of digital skills. What concrete impact has this had on learners and teachers worldwide? How can we address these inequalities in education?

In April 1998, two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, flew across the world to deliver a paper on their nascent search engine, Google. Speaking at the Seventh International World Wide Web conference (WWW 98) in Brisbane, Australia, Brin and Page described how their approach—taking the web’s existing link “graph” as a proxy for quality and relevance—improved on the classified-by-hand indexes of Yahoo!, Lycos, and the like.

Over the last years the number of open access publications has drastically increased. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown the rising role and relevance of bringing out and exchanging scientific results faster than ever. Tens of thousands scientific articles hosted on preprint servers were published only during the first ten months of the pandemic.

Conducting surveys and designing questionnaires is common research practice, and not only for the social sciences. One might think that there is a vast array of good software tools out there. The first half is correct: when looking for software for setting up a survey, one is confronted with plenty of options. However, depending on what you want to do, it can be tricky to find a good tool that checks all the boxes.

Introduction In December 2018, a University of Minnesota web librarian, Cody Hanson, participated in a workshop hosted by the Coalition for Networked Information. The topic of this, and a number of other events to date, is the drive by major scholarly publishers to more fully integrate authentication systems for accessing electronic media into their platforms.

2020 was different for all of us to say the least and only time will tell what this pandemic will mean for our futures – personally and professionally. Science has taken center stage during this year and thus, a lot of issues that were previously only discussed within the community have gained more attention from society. After an eventful year we would like to take a look back at the Elephants in the Lab of the Year.