Social Science Space

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.

One of the proposed advantages of open access publication is that it increases the impact of academic research by making it more broadly and easily accessible. Reporting on a natural experiment on the citation impact of health research that is published in both open access and subscription journals, Chris Carroll and Andy Tattersall, suggests that subscription journals still play an important role in making research discoverable and useful and thus still have a role to play even in open publication strategies.

“We felt it’s important to dissociate the specific paper from making policy recommendations, because this is taking things to a different level. Now, if you ask my opinion about whether it does have policy recommendations or implications separate from the study, I think what it says is that this is a very common infection, and very often it is asymptomatic, so it goes below the radar screen. “

Getting named on a journal article is the ultimate prize for an aspiring academic. Not only do they get the paper on their CV (which can literally be money in the bank), but once named, all the subsequent citations accrue to each co-author equally, no matter what their contribution.

The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.

The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses were caused by blockages that interfered with the healthy flow of magnetic fluid through the body.