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 […]
Don’t Just Publish and Hope – Get Creative to Have Impact
Sorry, but academic publications in themselves are less likely to merit impact, though; if researchers want to reach beyond the ivy tower of academia, there are certain steps they can take. Why not consider a campaign? Toby Green discusses the imperative to ensure that researchers are seeking and finding proper audiences if they intend to cause impact. Researchers who do so will be more visible, and they’re more likely to win grants.
Why the Community that Sings Together Stays Together
Is singing is a behavior that evolved to bond groups together? This question launched a research project that involved London’s Megachoir and the charity Workers’ Educational Association.
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 […]
Using Twitter as a Data Source: Social Media Research Tools
Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. In this post, Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms.
Leon Redbone, Fact Checking, and Ethnography
In recent popular music, there have been few if any performers as enigmatic as the late Leon Redbone, who died on May 30. With a vintage repertoire featuring tunes from ragtime, blues, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, and always appearing in dark glasses and a Panama hat, he looked like a figure straight out of the 1920s.
Misinformation and Biases Affect Social Media, Intentionally and Accidentally
Information on social media can be misleading because of biases in three places – the brain, society and algorithms. Scholars are developing ways to identify and display the effects of these biases.
Heard the One About a Politician Who Became a Friend on Facebook? New Political Communication
David Canter considers the impact of changing ways in which politics is communicated. In the age of the internet direct encouragement of what the audience is to feel, rather than detailed exposition of policy and achievements, is the order of the day.
Better lives with better toilets: An ESRC Better Lives Essay
Ian Ross is a development economist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where his studies and work as a research degree student focuses on the financing of water, sanitation and hygiene, or WASH, services. His PhD topic, and doctoral studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council, looks at cost-effectiveness of sanitation in Maputo, Mozambique, and one aspect on this is also the subject of this co-winning essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition. The competition asked PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives.
