In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers’ opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany...

The aim of this article is to explain commonalities and differences in the responses of four national educational science communities to the same external stimulus, namely international comparative large scale student assessments that offered vastly improved comparability of national results...

Evolutionary developmental biology is a highly variable scientific innovation because researchers can adapt their involvement in the innovation to the opportunities provided by their environment. On the basis of comparative case studies in four countries, we link epistemic properties of research...

Bose-Einstein condensation is a scientific innovation in experimental physics whose realisation required considerable time and resources. Its diffusion varied considerably between and within five countries that were comparatively studied. Differences between countries can be explained by the...

Under conditions of an increasing scarcity of reviewer time, a ‘remote peer review’ of research organisations — conducted without meetings between assessors or with the assessed academics at their institution — might be an easier and cheaper solution. This paper explores the impact of...

The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion about links between epistemic properties and institutional conditions for research by providing an exploratory analysis of such links featured by projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Our analysis identifies epistemic properties...

Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany,...

Although ‘research income’ is one of the most common indicators for assessing research quality, its validity has never been systematically investigated. The conditions under which Australian and German physicists obtain external funding were analysed in a comparative qualitative study. The...

Peer review is a practice of research assessment where a researcher's work is evaluated by colleagues working in the same field on similar topics. Since interdisciplinary research is a new synthesis of expertise, the problem arises that peers in that sense do not exist. The aim of the paper is...