At the STI-ENID 2025 conference held at Bristol University, Shizuku Sunagawa and Prof. Nelius Boshoff presented findings from the In-Forest project in two sessions, Understanding Structural Inequities in Knowledge Production and Reconciling diversity challenges and practice in research, respectively. Ahead of the conference, In-Forest members convened for a project meeting to further develop analyses for manuscripts under preparation.

From 3-5 September 2025, the 29th Annual International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI-ENID 2025) was held at Bristol University (UK). This year’s conference was centred around the theme “Reconciliation of research and measurement”. It aimed at exploring how to bridge divides in methodology, epistemology, and indicator debates, while addressing equity and diversity in research and evaluation. 

In the session on Understanding Structural Inequities in Knowledge Production, Shizuku Sunagawa presented on the topic, “Reconciling bibliometric and qualitative methods to examine inequalities in scientific publishing: insights from a mixed-methods study on African forest governance research.” Drawing on the experiences working with different methods and data types in the In-Forest project, she shared the potential as well as the challenges of bringing together bibliometric and qualitative analyses to study persistent patterns of inequality scientific publishing, and how they relate to epistemic choices and struggles experienced by African forest researchers. 

In the session on Reconciling diversity challenges and practice in research, Prof. Nelius Boshoff gave a presentation entitled “Studying inclusion in international (forestry) science: a bibliometric approach based on researcher contributions to core and non-core journals.” He shared preliminary findings from an exploratory study on the level of inclusion of researchers in the global scientific community, based on the extent to which they contribute to the so-called publication ‘core’: a set of journals characterised by international scope and citation interconnectedness. Drawing on an author-level dataset of forestry researches compiled from Dimensions and OpenAlex, he outlined a classification of different groups of researchers, highlighting regional and country differences. Moreover, Nelius served as chairperson for the session Gender issues in research assessment, dissemination and process. 

Ahead of the conference, In-Forest members gathered for a project meeting where they shared updates on ongoing analyses, distributed tasks for papers in progress and planned dissemination activities for the remaining project months.  


Preprints of our conference papers are available on SocArXiv: