About:
Melanie Rügenhagen is manager of the HEADT Centre (Humboldt-Elsevier Advanced Data and Text Centre) and does research for
her dissertation on the quality of qualitative research. In specific, she investigates how information science reviewers evaluate qualitative research in peer review.
Between 2014 and 2017 she coordinated the MA Digital Curation, which was an international joint study program offered
by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) and King’s College London. It was closely tied to digital long term archiving, which is the area Melanie Rügenhagen
did research on for her master’s at the Berlin
School of Library and Information Science at HU Berlin (completed in 2014). She continued research
in that field on the project “National Hosting of electronic Resources” (2014-2016). As a student, Melanie Rügenhagen did ethnographic research for the project Shaping Knowledge in the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung (German: Bild Wissen Gestaltung) at HU Berlin.
Fields of Interest:
Melanie Rügenhagen does research on the quality of qualitative data, especially ethnographic data. There are many approaches to defining criteria for ensuring the quality of qualitative research data. The fact that there is no common standard makes the quality of research in this area hard to evaluate and hard to prove. Yet it is unclear whether standards make sense for this kind of research. An important factor in determining this is current research practice. That leads to perspectives from the field (esp. ethnography-oriented disciplines) on (a) how researchers handle their data (from collection to archiving) and how their approaches make sense in their contexts, and (b) to what degree either researchers or external people (such as editors or readers from the public) can judge and trust the quality of research.
