Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
There is no doubt that good communications and framing research for your audience is important to influencing policy and having impact. But shouldn’t we be aiming higher than producing and packaging research that simply meets the demands of policy actors? James Georgalakis argues that research and researchers need to challenge dominant paradigms and expose inconvenient truths.
Tina Basi and Mona Sloane argue that REF 2021 offers the opportunity to frame a discussion on the purpose of universities that is less focused on economics and more focused on people and public engagement, returning closer to the Humboldtian model of higher education.
Christina Boswell and Katherine Smith set out four different approaches to theorizing the relationship between knowledge and policy and consider what each of these suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.
Usha Haley shares findings of a recent Academy of Management report that sought to answer the impact of scholarly research. By surveying 20,000 members & conducting a selection of interviews, most scholars felt the present system of evaluation and rankings has led to an over reliance on traditional techniques and methodologies, and even “junk science”.
When discussing the nexus of computer science and social science, the transaction is usually in one direction – what can computer scientists do for social scientists. But a recent paper from Tufts University anthropologist Nick Seaver reverses that flow, using the tool of ethnography to interrogate the tools of engineering.
A connection can be made in between Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and her father’s groundbreaking work in anthropology. His ideas – which had a profound influence on his daughter’s writing – stemmed from an important development in the discipline of anthropology, one that viewed human culture as something that wasn’t ingrained, and had to be taught and learned.
Efforts to assess scholarly impacts must account for the great diversity of scholarly work and ensure that researchers themselves play a leading role in selecting those indicators that best suit their work. Peter Severinson reports on work published by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada that hopes will provide guidance to university administrators, public servants, and other members of the research community undertaking the demanding work of impact assessment.
The head of the House science committee falsely claimed the National Science Foundation funds “more than twice as many graduate students in the social and behavioral sciences as in computer science, mathematics or material science.”