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 […]
International Students in China: Divergent Journeys and Multidimensional Lives
Mengwei Tu, a lecturer in sociology at East China University of Science and Technology, describes her encounters with two postgraduate students from Pakistan. They highlight both China’s potential to become an attractive destination for international students and the difficulties involved in the internationalization of a society that was isolated from the outside world for much of its recent history.
Britain’s Mental Health Crisis, Mindfulness and the Sociological Imagination
The popularization of mindfulness, write Daniel Nehring and Ashley Frawley, cannot just be understood as a recent response to public perceptions of a mental health crisis. Rather, it is the result of developments in academic psychology, in its clinical uses in psychotherapy, and in its growing commercial exploitation from the 1980s onwards.
NSF Latest U.S. Agency to Scrutinize Foreign Role in Research
The U.S. National Science Foundation has followed other research-based government agencies in trying to ring-fence American research from collaborative and acquisitive foreign actors. Could they mean China?
Sociology & Philosophy the First Victims in Bolsonaro’s Culture War
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, threatens to slash funding to sociology and philosophy departments. It was just the opening shot in a new battle against the humanities.
UC Librarian Foresees Seismic Shift from Elsevier Showdown
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
Have We Outsourced Impact Measures to Database Providers?
Arlette Jappe, David Pithan and Thomas Heinze find that the growth in the volume of ‘evaluative citation analysis’ publications has not led to the formation of an intellectual field with strong reputational control. This has left a gap which has been filled by commercial database providers, who by selecting and distributing research metrics have gained a powerful role in defining standards of research excellence without being challenged by expert authority.
Real Fake News: How Parts of the Media Misconstrued ‘Trump Disorder’ Research
It is always important in reporting and media to have a story that is being represented accurately. With skewed assumptions and loaded […]
Jonathan Portes on the Economics of Immigration
Britain’s former chief economist knows a thing or two about the impact of immigration on native Britons. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he reviews what data can tell us about the UK’s current heavy inflow — such as that new arrivals create both supply AND demand.
