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 […]
Ebola – What’s the Point of the World Health Organisation?
WHO is supposed to be a global health organization, not a global biomedical organization. The Ebola crisis, argues Robert Dingwall, reveals the extent to which it has lost sight of this mission.
Social Science in the News
ESRC Sheffield Festival of Social Science Sheffield Hallam University Social science is everywhere. From helping us to make sense of our finances […]
Tweet Nothings? Academic Freedom and Private Rants
At what point to private (and perhaps unpalatable) opinions expressed off-campus impinge on a scholar’s employment? This abstract question has been made concrete in two recent cases.
Shaken and Stirred: Christakis on Re-ordering Social Science
With one foot firmly planted in natural science and one in social science, Yale’s Nicholas A. Christakis looks at the landscape of the latter and wonders why it’s changed so little in the past century. Is it time for a common-sense, and yet radical, reshuffling of the institutional frameworks that we tend to accept as permanent?
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.
Locating International Relations on the Social Science Map
A just-published lecture on international relations as a social science suggests that no discipline is an island.
World University Rankings: The Haves Have It
There’s a rankings mania affecting institutions of higher education. But just because it’s a mania, does that make bad?
The Scottish Referendum: Social Science and National Identity
As the independence vote moves from all-consuming question to historical incident, what are the lessons that Scottish universities and in particular Scottish social scientists should take away?
