Social Science Space

Chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.

Patrick Dunleavy argues that there have already been three false starts in open science: focusing only on isolated bits of the open agenda in ways that don’t connect and so are not meaningful; loading researchers with off-putting, external bureaucratic requirements; and risking reopening ‘sectarian’ divides between quantitative and qualitative social scientists.

If you can really do communication in an accessible way, explains Patrick Dunleavy, your writing may also circulate widely in other disciplines and in the external world outside universities, enhancing your reputation there. And you are in luck – he also explains one way to do that.

The social sciences are catching up with other departments in helping shape businesses, writes Patrick Dunleavy, the general editor of the LSE’s new Business Review blog..

Lack a personal website? No CV posted online? Is your work visible on digital listings? If you are answering no, Patrick Dunleavy offers some advice how to easily shed that monkish role — if you want to.

Be substantive and communicate your key findings – simple counsel from Patrick Dunleavy. But how exactly do you that? Here’s how.

Patrick Dunleavy offers four principles for improving how you display tables, graphs, charts and diagrams to give the beleaguered reader help in deciphering your message.

An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, or languish unread among hundreds of millions of other documents on the Web. That must be what what we want, based on on what we do.