Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
In the first of a series of short posts by Adam S. Levine spotlighting what the organization Research4Impact has learned about connecting social science researches with practitioners, he identifies four reasons why nonprofit practitioners have wanted to engage with social scientists.
The greatest value of research is the positive impact it has on society. In this first blog post from a series looking at seminal academic articles from the SAGE Inspire collection, the editor of ‘Administrative Science Quarterly’ talks about a key 2016 piece on ‘whitening résumés.’
In less than a decade the impact agenda has evolved from being a controversial idea to an established part of national research systems. Over the same period the ability to create and measure research impact through digital communication media has also developed significantly. Ziyad Marar argues that it is time to reinvigorate the debate on demonstrating social science research impact and to develop a language unique to researchers.
SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space, has released a report on measuring the impact of social science. Two issues undergird the report – that traditional “literature-based” measurements of impact are insufficient for modern demands to show value for money, and that new technologies make new ways of measuring impact possible.
Australia has been sampling a variety of tests for measuring research impact for more than a decade, but has yet to settle on whether the ‘impact agenda’ is here to stay.
Showing impact is a question of timescales as well as metrics. If you invest in research you are likely to see success in high-quality research outputs such as publications, as the UK has demonstrated in the past couple of decades. But it’s harder to demonstrate innovation and it takes longer.
For this fifth article in the series of measuring impact, Louis Coiffait spoke to two leading UK experts who also know other countries; Dr Hamish McAlpine, head of knowledge exchange data and evidence at Research England, and Sean Fielding, director of innovation, impact and business at the University of Exeter, and also the chair of the UK national knowledge exchange association, PraxisAuril.
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.