Awards for the GCRF Interdisciplinary Research Hubs will soon be announced. Each of these Hubs will inevitably have to balance the different imperatives of research excellence, development impact, and collaborative processes. To improve their chances of being successful in doing so, Valeria Izzi and Becky Murray suggest that each Hub must set out with the explicit intention of being greater […]
Category: research methods
How to run a book sprint – in 16 steps
A “book sprint” is a method of writing a book collaboratively in only a short period of time, usually less than a week. Lambert Heller and Helene Brinken share insights from their own experience of facilitating a book sprint to write the Open Science Training Handbook earlier this year. Here, the process is measured out over a distance of 16 […]
The overall incidence of published replication studies in economics is minuscule – greater incentives are required
Replicability is considered a hallmark of good scientific practice, an important post-publication quality check. But how many studies are chosen for replication? Frank Mueller-Langer, Benedikt Fecher, Dietmar Harhoff, Gert G. Wagner have examined the economics literature and find that only one in one thousand publications are replication studies. The introduction of mandatory data disclosure policies may help to increase the […]
“Interdisciplinary, like everyone else.” But are you being interdisciplinary for the wrong reasons?
Interdisciplinarity is the talk of the town. Funding agencies favour interdisciplinary research proposals, teaching programmes focus on developing interdisciplinary courses, and the publication of interdisciplinary studies has surged over recent decades. Lakshmi Balachandran Nair considers whether interdisciplinarity remains a strategy to surpass the limits of the methodological tools, theories, and views offered by a single discipline or has instead become […]
Sandpits can develop cross-disciplinary projects, but funders need to be as open-minded as researchers
The research “sandpit”, where a cross-disciplinary group of academics and practitioners come together for a short time to create new projects around a given theme, is gaining ground as a way to foster innovation and creativity in research design. While sandpits can spark ideas for novel projects better suited to tackling grand challenges and urgent questions, research from Kate Maxwell, […]
It is advisor attitudes that are likely to shape students’ attitudes towards questionable research practices
In debates on the validity of academic research findings, focus has been drawn to so-called questionable research practices, commonly understood to encompass a laundry list of behaviours that can increase the likelihood of statistically significant (and so more publishable) results. Anand Krishna and Sebastian M. Peter report on research examining attitudes to questionable research practices among students who have recently […]
Replication is both possible and desirable in the humanities, just as it is in the sciences
Some scholars have claimed that replication – the independent repetition of an earlier study, answering the same study question, using the same or similar methods under the same or similar circumstances – is not possible in the humanities. The reasoning is that the humanities search for cultural meaning can yield multiple valid answers, and that research objects are people and […]
Nothing lasts forever: questions to ask yourself when choosing a new tool or technology for research
Academia has become increasingly reliant on third-party tools and technologies to carry out many of the processes throughout the research lifecycle. But there are genuine concerns about the sustainability of some of these tools and what the implications would be for users in the event they were discontinued. Andy Tattersall suggests a series of straightforward questions researchers should ask themselves […]
Book Review: Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew J. Salganik
In Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, Matthew J. Salganik explores the process of undertaking social research in the digital era, examining a wide range of concepts while also offering teaching activities and materials. In bringing together the expertise of social and data scientists to the benefit of both, this is a comprehensive overview of new approaches to social research […]
Contrary to common belief, randomised controlled trials inevitably produce biased results
Much of the social and medical sciences depend on randomised control trials. But while this may be considered the foundational experimental method, a certain degree of bias inevitably arises in any trial; whether this is sample bias, selection bias, or measurement bias. This is important as the level of validity of a trial’s causal claims can be a matter of […]