How can the impact of an academic article be measured? It seems that everyone wants to find an answer to this question – from the researcher and author teams that create research articles, to the editors and peer reviewers who curate them, to the societies and publishers who ensure that the articles are released to the world.

Arbitrary choices –all those political considerations that twist and constrain scholarship without adding to it in intellectually meaningful ways — are rife in contemporary academic sociology, says our Daniel Nehring. Tired of trying to pointlessly argue against them in hopes they disappear, he asks that we make these choices explicit and visible.

SAGE’s Ziyad Marar describes his recent time at the 2018 SciFoo and some of his impressions mingling with its 330 assembled scientists, technologists, writers and more (the largest ever SciFoo) and compares it to the first SciFoo he attended five years ago.

Graduate research candidates are the powerhouse of research in universities, yet many have reported feelings of isolation, burnout, and career uncertainty. Karen Barry reports on a study of Australian research candidates which found that increasing numbers are suffering from heightened levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, often citing reasons related to academia’s general work processes, such as writing or publishing research or maintaining motivation while working alone on a single topic.

The literature review is a staple of the scholarly article. But when reviews misrepresent previous studies or suggest there’s a paucity of information when there isn’t, doesn’t,this degrade the knowledge base? Richard P. Phelps argues that, given the difficulty of verifying an author’s claims during peer review, it is best that journals drop the requirement for a literature review in scholarly articles.

The head of Sense about Science discusses the importance of public reasoning and accountability and why the first ever Evidence Week is a timely response to the changing demands of meeting those ideals, especially among politicians and policymakers. 

Management is a fairly recent social science, but for a number of reasons, academics in this field are particularly challenged by students, peers and fellow social scientists. But with experience, management scholars can succeed in showing the contribution that social science can make to educating business students.

Ambalavener Sivanandan, a former bank manager and then librarian who became an award-winning novelist and one of Britain’s foremost political thinkers on race, will be honored this Saturday at London’s Red Lion Square.

Researchers whose work has made a real difference to society or the economy, ranging from detailing the true numbers of modern slavery to transforming how we teach about sexuality, were celebrated at the ESRC’s sixth annual Impact Prize awards ceremony at the Royal Society on today.

The winners of the annual ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize will be announced Wednesday in an afternoon ceremony at the Royal Society. The Impact awards, now in their sixth year, are awarded to ESRC-funded social science researchers or ESRC associates who have achieved impact through outstanding research, collaborative partnerships, engagement or knowledge exchange activities.

Attending a workshop conducted by John Creswell changed Cheryl Poth’s academic trajectory, confirming an earlier epiphany that purely quantitative approaches weren’t telling the whole story that methodology can reveal. A decade and half later, Poth -joined Creswell to craft a fourth edition of his venerable  “Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design.”.

The the Textbook & Academic Authors Association has awarded the fourth edition of “Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design” its longevity award. In recognition of that, we talk with John Creswell, who has been behind the beloved book since its debut in the 1990s.