Social Science Space

Academic staff have been working harder than ever, and after an incredibly tough 18 months they are now prioritizing their wellbeing as a top concern. What can academic publishers learn from this?

Review papers play a significant role in curating the scholarly record. Drawing on a study of close to six million research articles, Peter McMahan, shows how review papers not only focus and shift attention onto particular papers, but also serve to shape entire research domains by linking them together and outlining core concepts. As such, the constitutive role of review papers and those who write them warrant further attention.

The Indian University Grants Commission (UGC) has introduced a number of policies aimed at addressing issues around the robustness and quality of Indian research. One focus of these policies has been the introduction of mandatory publishing ethics training for Indian PhD students aimed at reducing unethical or predatory research and publishing practices. In this blogpost, Santosh C. Hulagabali, reflects on the successful development of this course in his own institution and how ethical training may influence scholarly communication more broadly in India.

Theresa Jane Tanenbaum argues that publishers must commit to correcting all of their records when a scholar changes their name and not just the ones that are easy to correct.

Volunteer reviewers are one key obstacle – or ally – in seeing scholarship from indigenous authors makes into mainstream academic journals. Here are some tips to remove obstacles.

Behavioral and social science grant recipients from America’s National Institutes of Health appear to have not published their results within five years at a greater rate than for their non-behavioral peers. An NIH director investigated …

I claimed that New Mexico is part of the Galapagos Islands, that craniotomy is a legitimate means of assessing student learning, and that all my figures were made in Microsoft Paint. Any legitimate peer reviewer who bothered to read just the abstract would’ve tossed the paper in the garbage (or maybe called the police).

Kiren Shoman, the editorial director for SAGE Publishing, discusses what SAGE has learned from the higher ed sector as it reflects on how the pandemic response has affected teaching and what it expects once the new normal arrives.

In this Q&A conducted by the LSE Impact blog, social psychologist Sonia Livingstone outlines the ways that the pandemic has transformed the process of promoting a book. She discusses the heightened importance of social media and the opportunities that digital technologies have afforded for reaching new audiences and adapting conventional formats.

Alvaro de Menard, which we accept as the nom de blog of a non-academic “independent researcher of dubious nature” and […]

Academic capitalism exhibit a lack of transparency and accountability where it truly matters. Peer review and the ways in which journals often handle peer reviews are one key site of such intransparency and unaccountability.

Edited collections, are one of the most disparaged forms of academic writing, often written off as low quality, or a poor career choice. In contrast, Peter Webster argues for the unique benefit of edited collections, as a creative form of collective academic endeavor that does not sit easily within an academy that is averse to creative risk.