A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social scientists
In the first post from a series of bulletins on public data that social and behavioral scientists might be interested in, Gary Price links to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Alejandro Portes will be recognized for his award in October. He is the Princeton/University of Miami sociologist behind concepts such as the ethnic enclave and segmented immigration.
In this Business and Management INK post, Viktor Dörfler and Colin Eden of the University of Strathclyde Business School write about their research with 19 Nobel laureates examing how people at the ‘grandmaster’ level define what makes for good research .
A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.
University rankings might claim to provide an index through which students, faculty, and the general public might ascertain a number of things: the quality of education provided by an institution, the potential for networking at an institution, the breadth and depth of research being performed at an institution, and more. The institutional quest towards topping the university rankings can, however, derail efforts towards the improvement of society and higher education at large.
Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organization, but different visions towards public policy, some involving artificial intelligence, have been the subject of consideration from academics and politicians alike. Under what circumstances, and to what extent, could artificial intelligence replace the market as the end-all guiding force in crafting reasonable public policy? Brexit may play a leading role in the transition.
After a friend gave the reviewer a copy of ‘The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy’ by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, it gave him lots of food for thought: Working at a university, after several years of postdoctoral fellowships, why, indeed, not slow down?
The last in a series from Adam Seth Levine. “Diversity increases creativity and innovation…interacting with people from different backgrounds…can [also] be a source of…conflict.” With that possibility in mind, Adam Seth Levine wanted to know if the experience itself was enjoyable.
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.
The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.
Can social science’s impact be boiled down to improving and enriching lives? In recent years, there has been an uptake […]
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.
Surely preparing Britain’s social science community to take the lead in a future of global and interdisciplinary team research isn’t a quest for a mythical beast? Matt Flinders, who heads an ESRC project trying to nurture that leadership, doesn’t think so – but he understands why someone might think it is.
The Wales Centre for Public Policy is helping to inform and shape policy decisions by presenting research evidence directly to government ministers, producing over 120 studies in the last five years – supporting effective policy making and benefiting public services across Wales.
When practitioners first learn about the matches we do at r4i, one question that sometimes arises is whether it’s worth taking the time to speak with a researcher? Here Adam Seth Levine uses the 2018 data to help answer this question.
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. In Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. Could efforts like Plan S actually hurt this established initiative?
Even as government spending per-student for higher education institutions has been faltering in the United States, private money has been flowing in. But not all public institutions are getting the same amount of seed money from outsiders.
An estimated 312,000 children annually lose a parent to imprisonment in England and Wales. Dr. Shona Minson, is the winner for Outstanding Early Career Impact in the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2019.
A critical blind spot in the impact agenda has been that impact is understood and defined solely in positive terms. Gemma Derrick and Paul Benneworth introduce the concept of ‘grimpact’ to describe instances where research negatively impacts society. Researchers and science systems, they argue, are poorly equipped to deal with.
