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…
Category: research communication
Descriptive statistics are essential to making complex analyses useful.
In response to the ever-growing volume of data, quantitative social research has become increasingly dependent on complex inferential methods. In this post, Kevin R. Murphy argues that whilst these methods can provide insights, they should not detract …
Podcast: Do we need the arts to change the world?
The latest episode episode of the LSE IQ podcast asks: Do we need the arts to change the world? As the UK government looks to recover from the costs of the pandemic its decision to cut funding for creative higher education courses could be seen as a pr…
From science to stanzas – The role of poetry in research communication
Poetry can be perceived as the antithesis of science, indicative of a non-rational mode of thought, and famously banished from Plato’s ideal republic. However, as a form of communication poetry presents a unique way of engaging audiences and empowering…
Are personal academic blogs a thing of the past?
The personal blog was a defining feature of the early internet and there are still a number of high-profile academic blogs studiously maintained by lone scholars. However, for researchers new to academic blogging, is it still worth setting up your own …
Introducing cinematic scientific visualization: A new frontier in science communication
Data and its visualizers have always exploited the latest trends in media and communication in its quest to make seemingly dull numbers engaging, affective and interesting. In this post Kalina Borkiewicz, Eric Jensen, Stuart Levy, Jill .P. Naiman, and …
The devil’s in the framing: language and bias
How we say things can be as important as what we say. In this post, Ella Whiteley explores the “framing effect”, its implications for education and research communication and in particular, its salience to discussions of sex and gender. Picture yourse…
tl;dr – AI and the acceleration of research communication
AI is forecast to become increasingly central to many aspects of life and work. The same trends can also be detected in research. Drawing on a recent study of expert perceptions of AI uses in research and taking the recently launched tl;dr tool as a sa…
Wikipedia is open to all, the research underpinning it should be too.
Often thought of as ‘the last good place on the internet’, Wikipedia plays a key role in the online information ecosystem by linking its entries to current and historic research papers. But, after following these links, how much of this res…
2021 In Review: Evidence for Policy
The need to link research based evidence to policy has arguably been more urgent and important in the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic than it has ever been before. In the first of a series of review posts, we have brought together a selection o…