Social Science Space

Their paper about the evolution of malaria was in review for what seemed like an eternity. Every month, Susan Perkins and her then-graduate student Spencer Galen would check in with the editors. The problem seemed to be a lack of peer reviewers …

This Tuesday at 9 a.m., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be hosting a national symposium in response to the 200-page report: Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. The symposium will feature discussions on actions taken or contemplated in response to the report’s findings. Learn more or find out how to watch live.

What duty do social scientists have to report illegal activity that they witness as part of their fieldwork? If you answered quickly, you may not have thought about the issue all that deeply.

Some scholars claim that replication, in the humanities, is not possible. The reasoning is that the humanities search for cultural meaning that can yield multiple valid answers since research objects are people and interactive entities. This may be true but it does not automatically follow that replication is not possible. Its a desirable feature for studies in the humanities to be replicable.

In launching its first-ever task force report on Monday, the 95-year-old Social Science Research Council made clear it gets by with a little help from its friends. Collaboration, said sociologist Alondra Nelson Nelson, the president of the SSRC, is the byword of the report, To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good.

The recent brouhaha involving the BBC and the singer points out something the journalists and qualitative researchers share: the need to develop a common approach to the ethics of interviewing.

Rachel and Lisa explore how humanities, arts and social sciences expertise is applied to problems typically corralled into the science and technology space.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged his company’s responsibility in helping create the enormous amount of fake news that plagued the 2016 election – after earlier denials. Yet he offered no concrete details on what Facebook could do about it. Fortunately, there’s a way to fight fake news that already exists and has behavioral science on its side: the Pro-Truth Pledge project.

Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, ultimately makes research more efficient and effective. Yet despite policies that encourage and require data sharing, researchers in the UK and US report lower percentages of data sharing than average. Grace Baynes suggests researchers be given incentives, expert support, and training to make it easy to share data.

The recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire the Facebook data led to a surge of interest and questions around what companies do with people’s data. Amidst all of this, little attention has been paid to the feelings of those whose data are used, shared, and acted upon.

Like it or loathe it, publishing in highprofile journals is the fast track to prestigious positions in academia. Yet somehow, in the search to understand why women’s scientific careers often fail to thrive, the role of academic writing has received little scrutiny. So to examine the representation of women within academic writing, Ione Fine, Alicia Shen, Jason Webster & Yuichi Shoda review 166,000 articles (between 2005-2017) to see how many are by women.

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”.