While academic social science is extremely effective at generating public value, it is less adept at communicating this value. Sam Baars believes researchers should reflect on the ways in which social value is created not just from the findings of our research, but … Continue reading →
Category: Impact
Impact Round-Up 22nd February: Channels of academic influence, visualisations and turning raw data into actionable knowledge.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. This week, there was much discussion around Nicholas Kristof’s plea in the New York Times, Professors, We Need … Continue reading →
Engagement with academic research is thriving but more could be done to improve understanding of quantitative data.
Significant change has taken place in the UK and abroad in how academic knowledge is communicated, accessed and written, but persistent stereotypes of the unengaged, obscure professor are still widespread, evidenced most recently by last week’s New York Times article by … Continue reading →
Impact Round-Up 15th February: In gratitude to Stuart Hall, #publishperish14 and the fallacy of web objectivity.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. In gratitude to Stuart Hall, a socialist intellectual who taught us to confront the political with a smile by … Continue reading →
Improving on “Access to Research”: Restrictive access and licensing fail to meet the needs of the 21st century.
Major academic publishers have supported an initiative equipping public libraries with free access to a number of subscription journal articles. Cameron Neylon argues this Access to Research scheme is an empty political gesture that fails to meet the needs of the … Continue reading →
How-to guide for building a university-administered impact management tool for academics.
Coventry University have devoted time, talent and resources to come up with an embedded management tool to help academics plan and capture the impact of their research. Julie Bayley discusses the lessons learnt through the process of creating a functional, … Continue reading →
Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title.
An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, … Continue reading →
The deliberate quest for causal explanations will reinvigorate social science’s relevance in mass media and policy
Daily news reports and journalistic coverage highlight the powerful traction of causality for our everyday understanding of events and phenomena. From the 2011 UK riots to traffic accidents, Kamila Pieczara argues social scientists offer a competitive advantage when it comes to … Continue reading →
The case for greater transparency in experimental and social science research
Proving public value can be an especially difficult task when high-profile cases of fraud in social science disciplines emerge. Rose McDermott makes the case for greater transparency in both the production and review of social science to restore the legitimacy … Continue reading →
Social sciences research is riding high. But is it MOOC-proofed?
With four fifths of economic value-added found in services, the UK is now primarily a service economy. This is great news for social science disciplines who have demonstrated a strong influence in these industries. Whilst there are glimpses of optimism, … Continue reading →