The big idea Scientists don’t take time away from their research to share their expertise with journalists, policymakers and everyone […]

At a loss for how to demonstrate impact? Laura Meagher and David Edwards outline a dynamic understanding of impact evaluation comprised of ‘building blocks’. These building blocks are five types of impacts; five broad categories of stakeholders; and eight causal factors, along with a set of over-arching reflective questions.

As Lina Ashour has recently written, SAGE Publishing has helped make possible a report by the UK’s Campaign for Social […]

From the budding sense of a tight-knit community of fellow students and faculty, to radio silence, for a lot of students the rapid coronavirus-driven shift to a digital university experience doesn’t feel like enough. I am one of those students — a current graduate student who recently moved back home to America to finish up the last year of a dual-degree program.

James Jackson, a social psychologist whose pioneering survey of Black Americans created new methodologies and new insights about the psychological resiliency of the community, has died at age 76.

The Network for Advancing and Evaluating Societal Impact of Science, or AESIS, will hold the next edition of its Impact […]

Social Science Space took this opportunity of a call for nominations to ask Tom Kecskemethy, executive director of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, about the Moynihan prize specifically and career awards more broadly.

COVID-19 has devastated communities and economies around the world and profoundly changed the ways in which we live and work. […]

After a rapid switch to distance education due to COVID-19, many universities will remain as virtual campuses in the coming fall semester. For many universities, the focus has been on mastering or refining techniques for remote teaching. But a larger challenge looms.

The Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) community experts around the world will lead continuing discussions on broader impact topics. […]

Click here to read more about this year’s Aspect event and to register for any of the 19 webinars being […]

Ken Robinson, the revered and prolific evangelist for connecting education with the arts, died August 21 of cancer. He was 70. As Social Science Space prepares a full obituary, we repost an account of Robinson’s appearance to help mark SAGE Publishing’s 50th year in 2015; SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space.

Unfunded research takes time and money for already stretched academics. Yet it makes up over a quarter of all research carried out in British universities. Rosalind Edwards spoken to academics about why they do unfunded research.

Sociologist Kathy Charmaz, whose experience as an occupational therapist led her to develop a new take on the qualitative research methodology known as grounded theory, died of cancer on July 27. A professor emerita at Northern California’s Sonoma State University, she was 80.

Lynn Thigpen’s institutional review board asked whether she intended to research a vulnerable population, but they said nothing about the impact of interviewing on her own vulnerable heart and soul. So the former laboratory scientist acquired a new skill – qualitative research and listening for the important immeasurables.

One means of fixing and making ideas tangible, often scorned and neglected in the social sciences, but widely used in STEM, are spinouts. For universities, a spinout is a company formed on the basis of intellectual property from a university or research institute.

Although experts in bibliometry have pointed out the dubious nature of the h-index, most researchers do not always seem to understand that its properties make it a far-from-valid index to seriously and ethically assess the quality or scientific impact of publications.

Without research in social, organizational, and behavioral sciences, argues John Haaga, as serious as the investment in biomedical research, the United States may be no better off when the next acute crisis hits.

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 lockdown many opportunities have arisen to rethink how and for whom our societies operate. In this post, Julia Black argues that social sciences can play a unique role in the post-COVID-19 recovery by forging new relationships with business and commerce and outlines how initiatives, such as the Aspect network, are seeking to bridge the divide between the social sciences and business.

Political scientist Lucius Barker, a pioneering African-American academic whose influence in fields like constitutional law and civil liberties has been amplified by the high-profile leaders he mentored, died on June 21. He was 92.

One of the proposed advantages of open access publication is that it increases the impact of academic research by making it more broadly and easily accessible. Reporting on a natural experiment on the citation impact of health research that is published in both open access and subscription journals, Chris Carroll and Andy Tattersall, suggests that subscription journals still play an important role in making research discoverable and useful and thus still have a role to play even in open publication strategies.

In 2009, American Sociological Review published Arne L. Kalleberg’s “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition,” in which he explores the various ways unpredictable work impacts employees. Over 10 years later, sociologists actively turn to and build upon his work and the suggested structural changes needed to create more stable conditions.

Editor’s Note: If you’re curious about the ways in which data visualization and graph use can generate impact with regard […]

David Canter considers the emerging social science perspectives for controlling COVID-19

Vincent Adejumo says that his scholarship in the discipline of black politics can explain why there aren’t any national African American leaders at this moment, filling roles like Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer and others once did.