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 […]
Proof Over Promise: Finding An Impact Factor for Your Career
Publishing in a high-impact journal carries the implicit promise that somehow an individual article also will be highly cited. But the proof of this logic remains unsubstantiated. How about measuring career impact more than journal impact? The authors offer one option they’ve developed.
What Do Academia’s Ubiquitous Rankings Accomplish?
Why does it matter whether you study or work at the sociology department that comes first, 12th or 89th in a ranking? Why does it matter whether the journal you publish in is included and ranked in a certain index, or not? Let us know your thoughts.
Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists
Parsing federal education statistics, it turns out that prospective social scientists are the most avid consumers of humanities courses as undergrads (not counting humanities majors themselves, that is).
National Science Board: Defining the Case for Social Science
UPDATING: A presentation on social, behavioral and economic sciences funded by the National Science Foundation pressed one overriding message: we matter.
Should Self-Citation Count?
There has been much discussion over how useful citation metrics, like Google Scholar’s H-index, really are and to what extent they can be gamed. Specifically there appears to be concern over the practice of self-citation as it varies widely between disciplines. So what should academics make of self-citations? Referring back to our Handbook on Maximising the Impact of Your Research, the Public Policy Group assess the key issues and advise that self-citations by researchers and teams are a perfectly legitimate and relevant aspect of disciplinary practice. But individuals should take care to ensure their own self-citation rate is not above the average for their particular discipline.
Beating the Flawed Metric That Rules Science
The perceived importance of a scientific paper should reflect the deepest wisdom of the scientific community, argues Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, rather than the judgments of three anonymous peer reviewers. So where does that leave ‘impact factor’?
Viva Voce Podcasts: What You Do, Not What You’ve Done
Make an impact! make an impact! Early career social scientists here that refrain all the time. Gemma Sou cast around for a way to give her colleagues a voice in that quest, and hit upon podcasts.
Congress Questions Benefits of Government-Funded Research?
Trying to measure the benefits of scientific research using traditional business-oriented metrics may not be the best tool in our shed, argues Michael White.
