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 […]
A Primer for the Public: 10 Tips for Interpreting Research
We want decisions to be based on data and evidence and not ideology or gut feelings. But being presented with research results only starts the process of understanding what to draw from it.
Unknown Unknowns: The War on Null and Negative Results
The Wellcome Trust, a large funder of biomedical research, is keen to ensure that the findings of that research are widely and openly shared. Here, Jonathon Kram and Adam Dinsmore from the trust’s evaluation team discuss why any apparent bias against writing up and publishing certain types of results would impede scientific progress.
Myers-Briggs at Work? Might Be a Terrible Idea (MBTI)
Academics already tend to have a bone to pick with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as anything other than a parlor game. Nonetheless, while the personality test has a hold on the popular imagination it shouldn’t enter the workplace.
The Risks–Both Serious and Subtle–of Fieldwork
Amiera Sawas writes here on her experiences with risks in the field and beyond, finding that institutional protocols are undoubtedly robust on a wide range of physical threats, but more subtle threats, like sexual harassment, which cross psychological and physical lines, are not always explicitly dealt with.
European Scientists Fear Data Protection Overreach
Raising the drumbeat of alarm before a final European Parliament ruling later this year, a coalition of the continent’s research organizations have made explicit their opposition to new rules that they say would impede social science and medical research.
Replication Is More Common, But Still Too Rare
A study of the 100 top journals in education research found that there’s still almost no effort made to replicate the findings they publish.
A Social Science Audit for Facebook’s News Feed?
How can the public learn the role of algorithms in their daily lives, evaluating the law and ethicality of systems like the Facebook News Feed, search engines, or airline booking systems? Earlier this month Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosted a conversation about the idea of social science audits of algorithms, and J. Nathan Matias reports on the discourse.
Economists Behaving Badly Linked to Pressure to Publish
Sarah Necker describes her landmark study on economists’ research norms and practices and finds that while we all agree that fabrication, falsification and plagiarism are bad, a few academics admit they have accepted or offered gifts, money, or sex in exchange for co-authorship, data or promotion.
