Producing original knowledge is the foundation of scientific progress. Originality is associated with certain skills and practices that can be trained and socialised. This study investigates how inbreeding as a career practice influences the socialisation of originality. An analysis based on a sample of mid-career life scientists in Japan finds…

We explored the potential for addressing nature of science through a historic narrative about disagreement between researchers concerning a socio-scientific issue, incidence of juvenile thyroid cancer following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The narrative was developed from authentic sources and tested in two cycles. Eight groups of three…

Academic training is the initial step for junior scientists to learn to develop into independent scientists. This study investigates how supervisors decide to employ different approaches of early-career research training, and how these approaches influence the degree of trainees' independence in their later careers. Drawing on survey and…

Globally, science interest in diminishing among students, and as a result the science career field has begun to suffer from a lack of science career aspirations. The issue is especially relevant in developed countries, such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea, because of their policies and efforts to promote science and science education…

Women are underrepresented in physics. Because of the structure of the Japanese educational system, more women must choose physics as a subject for university entrance exams to increase the number of women studying advanced physics at university. In this study, we investigated the factors influencing girls' choice of physics for university…

The objective of this research is to discuss how Sociology contributes to identify "the experience of the unconscious gender bias" against female scientists and to assess its impact on their career development. This research is at the first stage of three-year research project. The final aim of this research is to identify the social…

Chinese and Russian universities are increasingly drawn into center-periphery repositioning, as they compete for symbolic, financial, and intellectual resources locally and globally. However, their strategies on national and institutional linkages differ with regards to the individual scientist's powers in knowledge production. As global…

The authors have been running UK-Japan Young Scientist Workshops at universities in Britain and Japan since 2001: for the past three years in England with Cambridge University and, last year, also with Kyoto University and Kyoto University of Education. For many years they have worked jointly with colleagues in a group of Super Science High…

Although doctoral mentors recognize the benefits of providing quality advisement and close guidance, those of sharing project management responsibilities with mentees are still not well recognized. We observed that mentees, who have the opportunity to co-manage projects, generate more written output. Here we examine the link between research…

The dissertation examines how Japanese university scientists in the biosciences responded to legal and institutional changes in academic entrepreneurship. Beginning in the 1990s, the Japanese government initiated a series of policy initiatives that attempted to imitate the U.S. academic environment's approach to promoting entrepreneurship. Using…

For language teachers who are concerned about referring to their own and students' identities other than in the roles of "teacher" and "student" in the classroom, this conversation analytic study aims to give insights into the use of identity. Detailed analysis of the data of English for a Specific Purpose (ESP) classrooms…

This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' twostep model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a "relative position within events of discursive interaction"…

In the spirit of historic astronomical endeavors, we invited school groups across the globe to collaborate in a solar distance measurement using the rare June 5/6th transit of Venus. In total, we recruited 19 school groups spread over 6 continents and 10 countries to participate in our Hetu'u Global Network. Applying the methods of French…

The global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite long-held prejudices and the lack of role models. Previously, when equality was not firmly established as a key issue on international or national agendas, women's colleges played a great role in mentoring female…

Social scientists have been studying imagined interactions since the mid-1980s and have measured numerous physiological correlates (Honeycutt, 2010). In this commentary I assess the research reported in Crisp and Turner (May-June 2009) and highlight the underlying mechanisms of imagined interactions that have empirically been laid out across…