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 […]
Academy of Management Report on Measuring Scholarly Impact
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”.
Washington and Social Science: The President’s Decimation of Social Science
While Congress will have the final say on the fiscal year 2019 budget, the budget proposal offered by President Trump would cut the National Science Foundation’s spending on social science would be cut by more than 10 percent.
Educational Reforms Still Have No Answer for School System
The Gates Foundation is regrouping after its latest school improvement disappointment, but it’s not bowing out of the education reform business. As the philanthropic powerhouse led by Bill and Melinda Gates explained in their latest annual letter to the public, it ended its effort to overhaul teacher evaluation systems after determining that these efforts were failing to generate intended results.
Ignorance and Interdisciplinary Work: Field Notes from the Social Science Foo Camp
The first-ever “Social Science FOO Camp” was held a couple weeks ago at the Facebook headquarters in California. What’s a Social Science Foo Camp? According to Tom Kecskemethy, director of the AAPSS, “its a hard-to-describe ‘un-conference,’ for the uninitiated.” Follow Tom in this post as he shares his perspective on the FOO camp and explains what he learned.
The State of Gun Research in the US: Six Questions Answered
The research needed to answer questions about the role of firearms in acts of horrific mass violence doesn’t exist – and part of the problem is that the United States government largely doesn’t support it.
New Members Appointed to Canada’s SSHRC
Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, or SSHRC, has announced the membership of its 18-member governing council.
Interrogating Ethnography – and Coming Up with the Wrong Answers?
A recent critique of Alice Goffman’s influential 2014 book, “On the Run,” has, in effect, put ethnography conducted in the United states on trial. Here, our Robert Dingwall argues a case for the defense.
Analyzing a Canadian Approach to Assessing Impact
Efforts to assess scholarly impacts must account for the great diversity of scholarly work and ensure that researchers themselves play a leading role in selecting those indicators that best suit their work. Peter Severinson reports on work published by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada that hopes will provide guidance to university administrators, public servants, and other members of the research community undertaking the demanding work of impact assessment.
