O’Donnell article named among Nature’s top 50 humanities papers of the decade
October 22, 2025
University of Lethbridge English professor Daniel Paul O’Donnell has been honoured by Nature’s humanities imprint, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, for co-authoring one of the Top 50 Most Influential Articles of the Past Decade.
The paper, titled “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence” (link), was originally published in 2017 in Palgrave Communications, the predecessor of HSS Communications. The journal—one of the most prominent interdisciplinary platforms in the humanities and social sciences—selected the top five papers from each of its ten annual volumes to mark its tenth anniversary. Selections were based on combined measures of citation impact, download rates, and Altmetric attention scores.
O’Donnell’s article, co-authored with Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, and Damian Pattinson, has been accessed more than 64,000 times and cited 192 times. It ranks in the 99th percentile of all research tracked by Altmetric and is the top publication in the journal’s Humanities and Social Sciences category.
The study examines how the rhetoric of “excellence”—a term that dominates university mission statements, funding competitions, and evaluation frameworks—has come to shape research culture worldwide. The authors argue that this language, while intended to promote quality, often produces the opposite effect: rewarding conformity and competition rather than intellectual curiosity, collaboration, or long-term value.
“The rhetoric of excellence turns out not to be excellent at all,” the paper concludes. “Used in its current unqualified form, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.”
The article traces how “excellence” operates less as a measurable quality than as a linguistic interchange mechanism—a flexible, self-reinforcing label that institutions use to signal prestige. Through extensive analysis of funding systems, peer review, and publication practices, the authors show that this performance of excellence can encourage questionable research behaviour, from publication bias to exaggerated claims of impact. They advocate instead for a new scholarly language based on soundness and capacity—principles that emphasise methodological rigour, transparency, and distributed opportunity over competitive hierarchies.
O’Donnell’s involvement in the project reflects his long-standing engagement with questions of research culture and scholarly communication. As founding director of the Humanities Innovation Lab and a pioneer in open-access publishing, he has championed community-governed and data-driven approaches to academic dissemination. His work with initiatives such as the Journal Incubator and the Open Library of Humanities has positioned the University of Lethbridge as a global contributor to re-imagining how humanities research is shared and assessed.
The Top 50 list, published in January 2025, celebrates the journal’s tenth anniversary and includes research spanning global governance, social media, misinformation, and artificial intelligence.