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 […]
Content Analysis Illustrates What Congress Wants from the NSF Today
What does Congress want from the National Science Foundation? This content analysis study conducted by Alison Beatty, Arthur Lupia and Stuart Soroka discusses the general trends and focuses on the NSF by Congress based on remarks made between 1995 to 2018.
Risks of Institutional Capture in University Decolonization, And How to Create Meaningful Change
As conversations around decolonization in universities are being afforded greater urgency, some key risks of this institutional capture or inertia to wider decolonization efforts are described by Rima Saini.
Beyond Illness: COVID-19 is Hurting Women In Academia
Women are facing additional constraints as a result of COVID-19. These range from the added burdens and responsibilities of working from home, through to the fact that fewer women scientists are being quoted as experts on COVID-19, all the way to far fewer women being part of the cohort producing new knowledge on the pandemic.
Digital Overload and the Nostalgic Joys of Analog
As a global pandemic leaves many drowning in the digital, the pleasures of our analog past are ripe for re-discovery. This post from Kip Jones recounts his feelings about the joys of physical media.
Has Over-Diagnosis Eroded What’s Considered Normal?
Fabian Fabiano and Nick Haslam researched whether the standard manual of psychiatry was creating runaway diagnostic inflation. Here they explain what they found.
Social Science ‘Spinouts,’ An Underappreciated Pathway to Impact?
One means of fixing and making ideas tangible, often scorned and neglected in the social sciences, but widely used in STEM, are spinouts. For universities, a spinout is a company formed on the basis of intellectual property from a university or research institute.
Minerva Initiative Seems Likely to Avoid Untimely Death
In early February, the proposed U.S. government budget for the 2021 fiscal year featured sizable funding cuts to many federally funded social […]
Might Commercializing Social Science Be a Road to Impact?
As the world emerges from the COVID-19 lockdown many opportunities have arisen to rethink how and for whom our societies operate. In this post, Julia Black argues that social sciences can play a unique role in the post-COVID-19 recovery by forging new relationships with business and commerce and outlines how initiatives, such as the Aspect network, are seeking to bridge the divide between the social sciences and business.
