With a vast array of performance and output measurements readily available on universities and individual academics, Deborah Lupton explores the parallels between the audit culture in academia and the quantified self movement. Quantified selfers can find great satisfaction in using data to take … Continue reading →
Category: Impact
Maximising luck: Six steps to getting your research noticed by journalists.
Stuart Fox traces the encounters and conversations which led to his research eventually being featured in a high-profile newspaper. He highlights here the lessons he learned about getting his research noticed by journalists and politicians. There is no simple, straight-forward … Continue reading →
Twitter and traditional bibliometrics are separate but complementary aspects of research impact.
In a recent study, Haustein and colleagues found a weak correlation between the number of times a paper is tweeted about and subsequent citations. But the study also found papers from 2012 were tweeted about ten times more than papers from … Continue reading →
From the precarious university to the rise and rise of social media: our most popular posts of 2013.
It has been a great year for the Impact of Social Sciences blog and we look forward to the exciting times ahead – particularly with the launch of our Research Book next month! But it wouldn’t be the new year without a … Continue reading →
Academic blogging is part of a complex online academic attention economy, leading to unprecedented readership.
Given the far-reaching attention of their paper on the nature of academic blogging, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson find blogging is now part of a complex online ‘attention economy’ where social media can help your work travel further. But in this … Continue reading →
With altmetrics on the rise, the education community can capture insights into how pedagogy research is being used.
The number of citations an article receives is often used as an indicator of impact but there are many instances where this metric fails to capture the wider results of how ideas are distributed. Adele Wolfson and Megan Brooks look particularly at … Continue reading →
As the REF submission period ends, mismatched publishing incentives signal challenging times ahead in academia.
Academics are frequently subject to new types of evaluations. November marks the end of the submission process for the UK funding council’s evaluation, the Research Excellence Framework (REF). John Hudson discusses some of the shortcomings of the REF and the methods … Continue reading →
The arts and humanities play a critical role in the development of vibrant communities.
Providing a historic look at how society has understood the value of the arts and humanities, Jason M. Kelly argues that today’s scholarship has largely framed itself around the context of the neoliberal commodified university. But there are other ways … Continue reading →
How to manage research papers on the go with PaperShip
Alex Hope is always on the lookout for new technology to assist with the day-to-day job of research and teaching. One of the most time-consuming tasks, he finds, is the management of his research library. PaperShip – a new IOS … Continue reading →
The Matthew effect and REF 2014: Funding disparities between UK universities may cause greater strains over time.
As the submission deadline for REF2014 draws nearer, there is a need to reflect on how the subsequent allocation of funding will affect the UK research environment. Dorothy Bishop argues that the rumoured funding formula would dramatically increase the gulf … Continue reading →