In the first post from a series of bulletins on public data that social and behavioral scientists might be interested in, Gary Price links to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Alejandro Portes will be recognized for his award in October. He is the Princeton/University of Miami sociologist behind concepts such as the ethnic enclave and segmented immigration.

In this Business and Management INK post, Viktor Dörfler and Colin Eden of the University of Strathclyde Business School write about their research with 19 Nobel laureates examing how people at the ‘grandmaster’ level define what makes for good research .

A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.

University rankings might claim to provide an index through which students, faculty, and the general public might ascertain a number of things: the quality of education provided by an institution, the potential for networking at an institution, the breadth and depth of research being performed at an institution, and more. The institutional quest towards topping the university rankings can, however, derail efforts towards the improvement of society and higher education at large.

Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organization, but different visions towards public policy, some involving artificial intelligence, have been the subject of consideration from academics and politicians alike. Under what circumstances, and to what extent, could artificial intelligence replace the market as the end-all guiding force in crafting reasonable public policy? Brexit may play a leading role in the transition.

After a friend gave the reviewer a copy of ‘The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy’ by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, it gave him lots of food for thought: Working at a university, after several years of postdoctoral fellowships, why, indeed, not slow down?

A decade ago, Elizabeth Buchanan and Erin Hvizdak set forth, in the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, some of the key elements that have since guided guiding ethical academic use of internet research methods.

One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that the action itself is divorced from real life or its real life roots – and that fascinates anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. By his own admission, what intrigues the latest guest in the Social Science Bites podcast series is that ritual is “behavior that is ‘causally opaque.’

Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist of religion whose work examined the evolving spirituality of the Baby Boomer generation in such words as A Generation of Seekers, has died.

In the last 20 years or so there has been much excitement, particularly in science and technology studies, about Actor-Network Theory. One of its most distinctive features is the way in which it ascribes agency to material objects. Perhaps we should not be crediting Bruno Latour or Michel Callon with the original insight – but an English humourist, Paul Jennings.

Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen. This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.