Social Science Space

It goes without saying that research has greater impact when more people have access to it. In a distracted, multilingual world we often struggle to get important research findings into the hands of those who can use what we’ve learned. As Dr. Tullio Rossi of Animate Your Science points out, visuals help us reach across disciplines.

A new machine learning tool can detect and classify different strengths of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter. Bertie Vidgen and Taha Yasseri explain their processes in creating a new tool that detects Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter.

Researchers asked science communicators what they need to know about their audiences. Age, education, gender and economic, educational, cultural and ideological background were typical answers. But to really know your audience, those are just a starting place.

At the Winter Academic Conference of the American Marketing Association, four Austin, Texas-based marketing professionals discussed how they stay up-to-date on the latest marketing strategies and research, the place of research-based recommendations over others, and tips for researchers who want to make an impact in practice.

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.

Large data sets can now be quickly analyzed to assess whether or not certain features, previously deemed unimportant, can actually affect the chances of a research paper being accepted for publication. In this post, James Hartley looks at new research on weekly submission dates.

WorldCat, an aggregate database of library catalogs worldwide, was primarily set up to aid libraries in carrying out their work in areas such as cataloging or resource sharing. Brian Lavoie offers an insight into the types of questions WorldCat data can provide answers to, and how research of this kind also amplifies the value and impact of library collections.

Psychologist Susan Fiske was the founding editor of the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In trying to reach a lay audience with research findings that matter, she counsels stepping a bit outside your academic comfort zone.

In honor of AERA Open being named “Best New Journal in Social Sciences” in the 2019 Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence, or PROSE, Awards, we’re highlighting three of the compelling studies — including an assessment of Common Core — that appeared in the journal last year.

A text analysis of nine years of grant abstracts submitted to the NSF indicated that what researchers say and how we say it can foretell the amount of funding we are awarded. They also show that the writing funders idealize may not always match up with what they actually prefer.

Publishing an article in a reputed academic journal is no mean feat. From the initial grant proposal, through to writing the paper, formatting it to meet journal guidelines and then waiting for peer review to be complete, a huge amount of time and work is required. And that’s assuming you’re accepted first time! Here’s how we counsel people about this at SAGE.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, which has a rather lengthy revised definition that it’s currently asking experts to assess.