In Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions, Peter Newell examines energy transitions at all levels of governance, drawing out the lessons learned from prior energy transitions to unlock an actionable understanding of today’s str…
Category: Featured
A step-by-step guide for using Wikipedia for research communication
The Wikipedia community has become a source of information for a broad and global public. Paul Börsting and Maximilian Heimstädt argue that contributing to the encyclopedia as a scholar can be a powerful way of achieving a strong societal impact of the…
Who gets to be a classic in the social sciences?
Of all the ideas produced by researchers in the social sciences, only a relatively small number of key ideas and researchers will become canonised as classics, objects of continued interest and key learning points for new researchers. However, the proc…
Storylistening: why narrative evidence matters for public reasoning and how to use it
As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated narratives, qualitative or quantitative, can shape, guide and make sense of public policies. However, the way in which the listeners and readers of these narratives receive and engage with them is often taken a…
Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.
Drawing on their recent analysis of journals in the field of Higher Education Studies, which shows that journals with lower impact rankings are more likely to feature research from diverse geographic and linguistic contexts, Shannon Mason and Margaret …
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…
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…