Find out more about the 16th Annual AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research! This year’s event will feature eminent sociologist Dr. Prudence L. Carter

The National Science Foundation, the largest government funder of basic social and behavioral research in the United States, is changing how it “positions” some of its research programs in those fields. While the changes are meant to better highlight the value of social science, not everyone is pleased by the changes.

Marilyn Whitman and Ashley Mandeville discuss their recent paper on the work spouse phenomenon. It appears in the Journal of Management Inquiry.

UPDATED: The U.S. Senate committee that oversees funding for the National Science Foundation, and with that most of the federal money spent on basic social and behavioral science research, today approved a 2020 budget that increases NSF spending by $242 million compared to the current fiscal year. The bill must still pass the full Senate, and be reconciled with a more generous House version.

This Tuesday at 9 a.m., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be hosting a national symposium in response to the 200-page report: Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. The symposium will feature discussions on actions taken or contemplated in response to the report’s findings. Learn more or find out how to watch live.

Individuals find it harder to cover conference costs – and departments or research groups have fewer resources to support them. It is not hard to see why there is a sense of grievance. On the other hand, it is not so easy to see what can be done.

Transcribing can be a pain, and although recent progress in speech recognition software has helped, it remains a challenge. Speech recognition programs, do, however, raise ethical/consent issues: what if person-identifiable interview data is transcribed or read by someone who was not given the consent to do so? Furthermore, some conversational elements aren’t transcribed well by pattern recognition programs.

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.