Veranstaltungsprogramm

Research institutions are increasingly expected to align their activities with societal goals framing engagement as a moral and institutional responsibility. In this context, collaborative research modes such as transdisciplinarity or participatory research have gained growing attention as formats designed to bridge scientific and societal knowledge production. These approaches aim to co-produce actionable knowledge across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, fostering mutual learning and relevance. Yet they also raise the question of how scientific autonomy and quality - understood as credibility, methodological rigour, and analytical distance - can be maintained when science becomes directly involved in societal problem-solving..

This paper examines these tensions and proposes a framework of reflexive boundary work to navigate them. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, transdisciplinary research is conceptualised not as a neutral bridge between science and society, but as a situated intervention within normatively charged problem spaces. It argues that productive collaboration requires the explicit negotiation of values, interests, and epistemic commitments rather than their dissolution. Through the lens of boundary work (Gieryn 1995) and boundary objects (Star/Griesemer 1989), the paper demonstrates how researchers can construct structured zones of engagement that allow science and society to interact without collapsing into advocacy or technocracy.

In doing so, the analysis highlights the dual role of researchers as both facilitators and analysts of these encounters - responsible not only for generating knowledge, but also for sustaining its epistemic integrity. Collaborative research, in this view, becomes a form of reflexive normativity: it acknowledges the value-laden nature of research while maintaining critical distance through transparency, methodological discipline, and the cultivation of epistemic pluralism. The paper thus contributes to debates on the ethics and responsibility of research by situating the normative orientation of collaborative research within the broader question of how universities can remain spaces of critical autonomy and collective reflection.

In this study, we investigate whether research topics in economics and business administration differ between German public and private universities. While institutional theory and resource dependence perspectives suggest that variations in funding structures and organizational missions could lead to distinct research orientations, other frameworks emphasize increasing homogenization across academic institutions. Using a large-scale text analysis of 63,994 dissertation titles and 124,580 journal article titles published between 1995 and 2020, we employ structural topic modeling (STM) to identify research topics and assess differences in their distributions by institutional type. To do this, we train an STM using all journal article titles and 75% of the dissertation titles to then test it on the remaining unseen dissertation titles. Contrary to expectations from theories of institutional divergence, our analysis reveals similar topic structures between public and private universities. Researchers of private and public universities focus on comparable research topics, with only small variations. This similarity is also persistent throughout the years. These findings suggest that within German higher education, strong forces of institutional isomorphism and disciplinary standardization prevail. In this study, we highlight how, despite differences in governance and resource environments, public and private universities operate within a shared framework shaped by international academic standards. The results contribute to ongoing debates about differentiation and homogenization in higher education, demonstrating how computational text analysis can uncover structural patterns in the production of academic knowledge.

Public trust in science relies on the assumption that research is conducted with honesty, transparency, and integrity. At the same time, academic careers increasingly depend on publication performance, as hiring, tenure, and funding decisions are largely based on publication and citation metrics. This reliance on bibliometric indicators, such as publication counts, h-indices, and citation rates, has turned measurable output into the central currency of academia. While these metrics promote comparability, they also reinforce competition and quantification at the expense of other scholarly values such as mentorship, intellectual risk-taking, and ethical responsibility.

The resulting “publish or perish” environment places researchers under immense pressure to demonstrate output quickly, sometimes at the cost of integrity. In response, scholars pursue strategies to maximize publication success, ranging from appropriate to ethically ambiguous practices that lie in a gray area between responsible research conduct and clear misconduct. Within this gray zone lie questionable research practices (QRPs) - behaviors such as selective reporting of findings, or honorary authorship - that may not explicitly break rules but can still distort the scientific record and erode credibility over time.

Despite growing awareness of these issues, we still know little about who engages in such practices, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Our study addresses this gap by examining whether specific QRPs and strategic research habits are associated with differences in publication outcomes, and whether certain groups of researchers systematically benefit from them. Drawing on survey data from researchers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland combined with bibliometric indicators, we ask whether the academic system itself may, unintentionally, reward behaviors that compromise integrity.

When strategic behaviors offer publication advantages, integrity risks becoming a competitive disadvantage - threatening fairness within academia and weakening science’s moral authority in society.