Coffeehouse – A collection of data blog posts from around the web

academic twitter, digital methodologies, digital methods, digital research methods, digital scholarship, Essential 'how-to' Guides, Featured, research on social media, Resources, Social Media, Twitter

Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (2019)

by Taster • June 18, 2019

Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. In this post, Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms. This post builds upon the 2015, and 2017 editions of […]

expertise, Experts, Featured, Government, Higher Education, March for science, policymaking, post-truth, Public Engagement, public trust in science, research communication, Research policy, science

The political dilemma of expertise – More than just public trust in experts

by Taster • June 17, 2019

Building on Katherine Dommett’s and Warren Pearce’s recent post on the evidence for public trust in experts, Matt Wood argues that whilst the death of the expert has been oversold, the question of how expertise is put to use in modern democracies remains an unresolved dilemma. Drawing on research underpinning his recent book, Hyper-active Governance, he suggests that competing tendencies […]

Academic communication, Featured, gender bias, Impact, impact agenda, Public Engagement, REF 2021, REF2021

Gender and the ‘impact’ agenda: the costs of public engagement to female academics

by Taster • June 14, 2019

Engaging in public discussion is a crucial aspect of academia. At the same time, female academics often encounter sexist abuse as a result of such engagement. Heather Savigny draws on interview data to argue that while women may seek to actively build impact and public engagement in to their research agendas, the site of interaction between media and academia is gendered and […]

DMPonline, Open Repositories conference, repositories, repository

Closing the gap – connection points between DMPs and repositories

by magdalena.drafiova • June 13, 2019

On Monday, we ran a workshop in Hamburg at the Open Repositories conference where we discussed potential connection points between Data Management Plans and repository platforms. We had a great variety of attendees from different backgrounds (li…

evidence, Evidence-based Research, expertise, Experts, Featured, Higher Education, Impact, post-truth, Public Engagement, trust

Have we really had enough of experts – What evidence is there for public attitudes towards experts?

by Taster • June 13, 2019

Following the Brexit vote and US presidential elections in 2016, it has frequently been argued that the current period is defined by a lack of trust in experts and expertise. But is there any empirical evidence to confirm or deny this assertion? In this post Kate Dommett and Warren Pearce analyse the available data on public perceptions of expertise and argue […]

Academic communication, Featured, Knowledge Construction, Networks, peer review, research infrastructure, Research policy

Peer review is not just quality control, it is part of the social infrastructure of research

by Taster • June 12, 2019

The purpose of peer review is often portrayed as being a simple ‘objective’ test of the soundness or quality of a research paper. However, it also performs other functions primarily through linking and developing relationships between networks of researchers. In this post, Flaminio Squazzoni explores these interconnections and argues that to understand peer review as simply an exercise in quality […]