Social Science Space

“Many people die without getting a transplant because there aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, living donor organs included. Sometimes, you might love someone enough to give him a kidney but you can’t give a kidney to the person you love, because kidneys have to be very well-matched. Kidney exchange is a way of getting some transplants done, even when patients and their donors are not well matched.”

Oscar Williams recounts his experience traveling to the Houses of Parliament with Sense about Science’s “Evidence Week” initiative.

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.

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.

To end his trilogy of articles on the research metric system (and Google Scholar in particular), Louis Coiffait explores what improvements could be made.

Louis Coiffait’s third article in his series on impact looks at the system of citation metrics, in particular Google Scholar.

In his second article in a series on impact, Louis Coiffait looks at how REF and KEF treat impact in the UK.

For social scientists, there must be a concern that a generation’s worth of accumulated empirical evidence on effective leadership has made so little impact on the candidates in the upcoming General Election in the United Kingdom.

If you were to make up a fantasy football team for, say an intellectual Premier League, which thinks from Socrates forward might be among your picks?

Many social scientists find themselves members of a cult of quantification, argues Robert Dingwall, in love with numbers for their own sake even when those numbers produce no useful knowledge.

No one expected Tamiflu to be a wonder drug, but indications are that it’s moderately useful in fighting a serious public health threat. But that message was lost last week in an ill-starred rush to beat up on ‘wicked’ Big Pharma, argues Robert Dingwall.

Back in the summer, John Holmwood, the current BSA President, sent me an email about impact and research ethics. Various […]