Rosie Cowan ticked numerous beats in her journalism career: politics for the Press Association, business for The Belfast Telegraph, and Ireland and later crime for the Guardian. Now a postgraduate research student in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast, she displays both her subject-matter expertise and writing skills in this co-winning essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition. The competition asked PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives.
Celia Robbins, a PhD student at the University of Exeter, spent 25 years working in environment and sustainability. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, she examines how wind energy has been playing out in Cornwall, and what that means for renewables beyond that bucolic county.
Turnitin and similar programs don’t deal with the causes of plagiarism. Rather, argue Amanda Mphahlele and Sioux McKenna, they allow institutions to claim they’re doing something without really tackling the issues that lead students to plagiarize.
A new preprint was recently shared on PeerJ Preprints on the Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Erin McKiernan discuss the investigation and the findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.
Social anthropologist Chloë Place, a research student at the University of Sussex, had both worked for the National Health Service working with older people with dementia and spent a lot of time living in Andalusia when she became interested in studying approaches to aging in the Andalusian context. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she describes how her ethnographic look at kinship care in a rural Spanish setting influences her perspectives on care elsewhere.
As part of a pioneering effort to systematically use privacy-protected Facebook data to study the platform’s impact on democracy, the Social Science Research Council and its partner Social Science One have named the inaugural recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants.
Daniel Nehring describes China’s social networking platform WeChat as ‘Facebook on steroids,’ and notes it has long surpassed e-mail as the main tool of mediating communication at Chinese universities while obliterating boundaries between work and home. Is this a cautionary tale for academe outside of China?
A new survey of university faculty finds that the idea of altmetrics – using something aside from journal citations as the measure of scholarly impact – has made less headway among faculty than might be expected given the hoopla surrounding altmetrics. These new measures are the most familiar in the social science community (barely) and least familiar in the arts and humanities (dramatically so).
To feel able to contribute to climate action, researchers say they need to know what actions to take, how their institutions will support them and space in their workloads to do it. A longitudinal research project project covering 31 villages in rural South Africa has led to groundbreaking research in many fields, including genomics, HIV/Aids, cardiovascular conditions and stroke, cognition and aging. Drawing on the findings of a workshop on making translational research design principles the norm for European research, Gabi Lombardo, Jonathan Deer, Anne-Charlotte Fauvel, Vicky Gardner and Lan Murdock discuss the characteristics of translational research, ways of supporting cross disciplinary collaboration, and the challenges and opportunities of adopting translational principles in the social sciences and humanities. By carefully interrogating the system of economic incentives underlying innovations and how technologies are monetized in practice, we can generate a better understanding of the risks, both economic and technological, nurtured by a market’s structure. You’ve likely heard the hype around artificial intelligence, or AI, but do you find ChatGPT genuinely useful in your professional life? A free course offered by Sage Campus could change all th Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric and Overton and currently Overton’s managing director, answers questions about the outsized impact that SBS makes on policy and his work creating tools to connect the scholarly and policy worlds.
EXPLORE
Impact
Survey Suggests University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Climate Change Action
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Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa
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Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact
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Innovation
To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing
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Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions
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Why Social Science? Because It Makes an Outsized Impact on Policy
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