Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Maximizing the Utility of Open Science
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.
How Could Google Scholar (and the Citation System) Be Improved?
To end his trilogy of articles on the research metric system (and Google Scholar in particular), Louis Coiffait explores what improvements could be made.
How Google Scholar Judges Research
Louis Coiffait’s third article in his series on impact looks at the system of citation metrics, in particular Google Scholar.
At a Glance: The UK’s Twin-track Approach to Measuring Impact
In his second article in a series on impact, Louis Coiffait looks at how REF and KEF treat impact in the UK.
Leadership and the UK General Election 2017
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.
Let’s Play Fantasy Football for Big Thinkers
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?
Quantophrenia is Back in Town
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.
Tamiflu and the Ethics of the British Medical Journal
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.
