Meta-Research 2017

Abstract

This document collects a selection of papers written by master’s students in the context of the “Research Methods” course common to the Master’s Programmes in Sound and Music Computing, Intelligent and Interactive Systems, Computational Biomedical Engineering and Wireless Communications, of the Information and Communication Technology Department at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, during the 2017-2018 academic year. The papers were written as part of an integrative assignment entitled “Meta-Research”, where students were expected to do a small piece of research about a transversal research topic. Students worked in teams and selected a topic, among those suggested in Table 1. A refinement of the topic, the particular research questions to study and the methodology to apply were proposed by the students and discussed with the course educators in tutoring sessions. A total of 15 papers were written by the students and presented in the classroom. Assessment included peer-review by students during the presentations and through a conference management program, assessment by the educators, and self-assessment. The results from the self-assessment were especially considered in the selection of the papers to include in this open document. Selected papers tackle among others interdisciplinarity in research, the influence of gender in science, open science and research-industry collaboration.