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 […]
One Size Does Not Fit All
Current efforts to solve wicked problems with a quick dusting of data are unlikely to result in socially useful answers. Luckily, there are innovative people and initiatives using a variety of methods to home in on real solutions.
Making Interdisciplinarity the Norm
Ziyad Marar, the global publishing director for Social Science Space’s parent, SAGE Publishing, discusses the bright-ish future of interdisciplinary social research as his contribution to the annual questioned posed by the Edge.org website.
Getting All Bibliometric Efforts Onto the Same Page
A recent conference aimed to bridge the gap between the different communities interested in bibliometrics. A key theme was the strong need for more openness and transparency: transparency in research evaluation processes to avoid biases, transparency of algorithms that compute new scores and openness of useful technology.
There’s Life Beyond STEM: A Plea from Australia
Academia has long recognized that wicked problems require cross-disciplinary research approaches, yet Australia’s Science and Research Priorities enthrall mainly STEM researchers. This divide puts academia back into silos: those on the sunny side of funding decisions and those under a constant rain cloud.
Stories and Numbers Should Go Together: Alex Clark on Methods
Methods have never been more pragmatic, more eclectic, and more dynamic than they are today, says Alex Clark, the editor of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.
Big Questions Require Teams That Step Across Lines
‘Interdisciplinarity lies not above the academy, but in its very foundations,’ say the co-authors of a new report looking at this issue.
Malaria Vaccine – Great Science But What’s the Point?
Bully for the researchers who have developed a vaccine can build resistance against some instances of malaria, says Robert Dingwall. But before the WHO recommends for its adoption, he suggests a harder look at user-centered design and cost-benefit analysis may be in order.
Behavior Routinely on Biomedicine’s Back Burner
The challenge of infusing the social sciences into what are generally viewed as biomedical issues has been a long and difficult one, as the recent WHO report on Ebola demonstrates. Oddly, this lesson has been learned many times before, but keeps getting forgotten.
