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 […]
Looking for Impact? Seek Feedback — Especially From Friends in High Places
Co-Pierre Georg and Michael E. Rose report on their recent study confirming that seeking out feedback and constructive criticism improves academic research and increases its impact, especially when that feedback is offered by well-connected colleagues.
Shake By All Means, But Social Science is Not Natural Science
Will Davies responds to the calls for a social science shake-up by questioning the status of the social sciences in 2014 as something other than mere understudies to the natural sciences. The shared terrain of the two, he argues, seems to rest on various acts of forgetting on the part of the social sciences, but no acts of learning on the part of the natural sciences.
Shaken and Stirred: Christakis on Re-ordering Social Science
With one foot firmly planted in natural science and one in social science, Yale’s Nicholas A. Christakis looks at the landscape of the latter and wonders why it’s changed so little in the past century. Is it time for a common-sense, and yet radical, reshuffling of the institutional frameworks that we tend to accept as permanent?
The Impact of Social Sciences Project by the Numbers
The Impact of Social Sciences blog emerged from a three-year research project devoted to a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the complexity of academic impact. To not let any impact-relevant knowledge dissolve away, Jane Tinkler takes a look back at the outputs, outcomes and connections made throughout the research process.
Social Sciences Learn the Tactical Benefits of Concentration
As it is released in North America, a book on the impact of social science in Britain suggests guidance for raising the disciplines’ profiles in the U.S. and beyond.
LSE Study Offers More Ammunition for Social Sciences’ Defense
A live-streamed panel discussion this week will officially launch a new effort to demonstrate the pocketbook benefits of social science in Britain and beyond.
Lessons from civil society
As academics think about impact, they can draw on some of the lessons and strategic approaches used by civil society and campaigning groups.
The BBC, North Korea and the Culture of Impunity
The controversy over BBC journalists’ use of a student tour group linked to the London School of Economics should not be allowed to go away quietly.
