Social Science Space

Elie Diner presents arguments for and against sharing research presentations online, arguing that sharing research presentations should be seen as part of the mainstream of open scholarship and is a natural way for academics to present their preliminary findings.

Publishing research that can be accessed as widely as possible is clearly crucial, but ensuring that research is accessible to similarly large groups of people is an altogether different challenge. Lucy Lambe explains how the LSE Library has worked with a comics creator and illustrator to create illustrated abstracts of articles that were funded to publish open access last year.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

As academics think about impact, they can draw on some of the lessons and strategic approaches used by civil society and campaigning groups.

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.

“The social scientists we could do business with were those who grounded their ideas through field studies, cultural probes and social data”.

We are swimming in ‘big data’ and despite their performances as advocates of data freedom, policymakers don’t seem to bear any responsibility for educating the public on how to read it.