Outside of specific institutional and organizational settings discussions about ‘impact’ often descend into confusion, as the term holds several meanings for researchers. Responding to a provocation from Ziyad Marar “On Measuring Social Science Impact”…
Author: Taster
The case against Revise and Resubmit
Extensive revising is required by many journals in the social sciences. It is expected that authors “revise and resubmit” (R&R) their manuscripts several times before they are accepted for publication, a process that is time consuming, demoralising…
Narratives and Evidence – Which stories about COVID-19 did we believe and why?
Rigorous empirical evidence is often presumed to be the most persuasive, notably in fields such as healthcare and medicine, where there are established frameworks for assessing the quality of evidence. In this post, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker ar…
Simplifying Responsible Research and Innovation – A tool building in societal readiness into research
Researchers and research funders are increasingly seeking to ensure their work is aligned to societal needs and to prevent it from having foreseeable negative impacts, particularly in fast moving and ethically sensitive fields. In this post, Stefan de …
Book Review: Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt
In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their do…
Lives change across academic careers – so should your writing habits
Are your writing habits the same as they were when you started your academic career? Are your lifestyle and responsibilities the same? In this post, Chris Smith explores how writing habits formed at the beginning of academic careers can be difficult to…
New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment
AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they s…
Aspirational metrics – A guide for working towards citational justice
Is it possible to have a just politics of citation? Reflecting on their work to create a guide to fairer citation practices in academic writing, Aurélie Carlier, Hang Nguyen, Lidwien Hollanders, Nicole Basaraba, Sally Wyatt and Sharon Anyango*, highlig…
Polarisation and the network harassment of science journalists.
Reporting on their qualitative research into the online abuse faced by science journalists in the USA, Lisa Palmer and Silvio Waisbord, find an uptick in the online harassment of science journalists alongside a lack of institutional support, especially…
Stratification, Centralisation and the REF – The changing face of the UK university workforce
Drawing on an analysis of HESA and case study data, Andrew Jenkins and Alison Wolf, explore the changing composition of the workforce in the UK higher education sector. Trends towards increased professionalisation and centralisation of roles, as well a…