In Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life, Scott Timcke explores how digital technologies are impacting US politics and society today. With a timely and original main argument, this book will be particularl…
Author: Taster
Reading List: Neglected Cases in the Social Sciences
In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites, Monika Krause explores how scholars in the social sciences and humanities repeatedly draw on particular cases and research objects, shaping our understanding of more general ideas in disproportio…
For Open Grant Proposals
David Lang makes the case that default open grant proposals benefit both individual scientists as well as the broader scientific community. Science is designed to move slowly. Debate, rigor, and peer review add layers of organized skepticism to new ide…
Book Review: Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms by Angèle Christin
In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms, Angèle Christin explores how the introduction of metrics and algorithms has affected journalists’ work practices and professional identities. Showing how metrics can work to exacer…
Vice-Chancellors should welcome staff participation in the governance of their university’s international partnerships
Universities and higher education institutions in the UK have a more international profile than at any prior point in their existence. As a consequence, they face entanglement in geopolitical issues. In this post, Andreas Fulda, John Heathershaw and An…
‘It could be effective…’: Uncertainty and over-promotion in the abstracts of COVID-19 preprints
A defining feature of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly communication has been the brief and intense surge in the production of preprints. This has had significant impacts on the ways in which new research findings have been reported and…
What or where is the ‘Global South’? A social science perspective
The ‘Global South’ has become a popular meta category in the practice and study of world politics. Exploiting its analytical potential, Sebastian Haug argues, requires explicit engagement with definitions, meanings and the implications of taken-for-gra…
Connecting research to policy is complex, unpredictable and time consuming – so should we expect academics to do it on their own?
Earlier in the year the chief executive of UKRI, Dame Ottoline Leyser, argued that a research culture that prizes the figure of the ‘lone genius’ has stifled productive collaboration. Drawing on the experience of UCL’s Faculty of Engineering Sciences P…
Book Review: Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham
In Causal Inference: The Mixtape, Scott Cunningham offers a new guide to methods for determining cause and effect in the social sciences. In summarising, systematising and prioritising methodological tools for researchers, this book will be of use to a…
Policy relevant, multidisciplinary, disruptive: What kind of research do economists want?
Based on a global survey of almost 10,000 academic economists, Peter Andre and Armin Falk explore what economists perceive to be worthwhile research in their discipline. Finding many economists think that economic research should become more policy rel…