Social Science Space

In a video interview hosted by Social Science Space sister site Methodspace, Stu Shulman, a social media researcher and the founder and CEO of Textifter, joined interviewer Janet Salmons to discuss the future of academic Twitter.

The fate of Twitter has been a pressing issue in the past weeks. Here, Andy Tattersall argues that whilst individual academics could quite easily leave the platform, the centrality of Twitter to academic institutions makes a wholesale departure unlikely.

After much speculation, Twitter has been acquired by Elon Musk. In this post, Mark Carrigan asks, if now is the time to rethink academic twitter by separating out the knowledge exchange and academic community building functions that have up to this point taken place side by side on Twitter.

In the report “Post-Baccalaureate Bridge Programs: An Underutilized Tool for Strengthening Faculty Diversity,” authored by Senior Advisor Eugene Tobin, Senior Researcher Daniel Rossman, Senior Analyst Christy McDaniel, Vice President of Educational Transformation Martin Kurzweil and Managing Director Catherine Bond Hill, the underrepresentation of diversity in academia and mechanisms to increase it are discussed.

Practicing behavioral scientist Preeti Kotamarthi finds it reassuring to know that this subject, which literally burst on the scene only a few years ago, has gained acceptance around the world, and students brave enough to study it now have a career to look forward to.

Women are facing additional constraints as a result of COVID-19. These range from the added burdens and responsibilities of working from home, through to the fact that fewer women scientists are being quoted as experts on COVID-19, all the way to far fewer women being part of the cohort producing new knowledge on the pandemic.

Do sociology graduate students need to publish more today than they did a generation ago to get a faculty position? Do assistant professors need to publish more to get tenure?

Using bibliometrics to measure and assess researchers has become increasingly common, but does implementing these policies therefore devalue the metrics they are based on? Here researchers present evidence from a study of Italian researchers revealing how the introduction of bibliometric targets has changed the way Italian academics cite and use the work of their colleagues.

Despite warnings from universities (under government pressure), thousands of students in Indonesia protested controversial bills. What role, if any, should academics play in the support and encouragement of student protesters?

The managerialist logic that has permeated universities has had a clear impact on academic work. To Senia Kalfa, Adrian Wilkinson and Paul J. Gollan, academia has become like a game, with academics competing with each other for a handful of permanent positions & focused completely on accumulating the capital needed to secure one.

Despite claims to award university appointments based on meritocracy alone, gender inequality continues to impact the number of women in […]

The reference section of an academic work is more complex than you might think. The references not only provide validity […]