Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
When They Connect with Researchers, are Practitioners Time-Sensitive?
Traditionally one of the biggest obstacles to building relationships between researchers and practitioners is different time scales — nonprofits’ “focus is urgent, immediate, and often in response to events…moving quickly and loudly” whereas “academics work to a different rhythm”.
Making Text Data Accessible for Social Science
More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language.
NSF Latest U.S. Agency to Scrutinize Foreign Role in Research
The U.S. National Science Foundation has followed other research-based government agencies in trying to ring-fence American research from collaborative and acquisitive foreign actors. Could they mean China?
Impact and Assessing Public Engagement
Promoting public engagement with research has become a core mission for research funders. However, the extent to which researchers can assess the impact of this engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, Marco J Haenssgen argues we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement and begin to develop a skills base for the external evaluation of public engagement work.
Why Does the British Labour Party Struggle with Antisemitism?
Britain’s Labour Party historically had strong ties to the idea and later the state of Israel. Now a host of factors are challenging the traditional connection to Zionism and even raising concerns of antisemitism.
No More Tradeoffs: The Era of Big Data Analysis Has Come
For centuries, being a scientist has meant learning to live with limited data. People only share so much on a survey form. But, at least in the area of text analysis (AKA content analysis, or natural language processing), the old limits are crumbling
Sociology & Philosophy the First Victims in Bolsonaro’s Culture War
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, threatens to slash funding to sociology and philosophy departments. It was just the opening shot in a new battle against the humanities.
UC Librarian Foresees Seismic Shift from Elsevier Showdown
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
