Impact

Shake By All Means, But Social Science is Not Natural Science
Higher Education Reform
October 14, 2014

Shake By All Means, But Social Science is Not Natural Science

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What Can REF Teach Us About Impact?
Academic Funding
October 7, 2014

What Can REF Teach Us About Impact?

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Help ESRC Find the 50 Biggest Social Science Achievements
Impact
September 23, 2014

Help ESRC Find the 50 Biggest Social Science Achievements

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A Pioneering Behavioral Science Think Tank at the Crossroads
Impact
September 22, 2014

A Pioneering Behavioral Science Think Tank at the Crossroads

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Proof Over Promise: Finding An Impact Factor for Your Career

Proof Over Promise: Finding An Impact Factor for Your Career

Publishing in a high-impact journal carries the implicit promise that somehow an individual article also will be highly cited. But the proof of this logic remains unsubstantiated. How about measuring career impact more than journal impact? The authors offer one option they’ve developed.

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What Do Academia’s Ubiquitous Rankings Accomplish?

What Do Academia’s Ubiquitous Rankings Accomplish?

Why does it matter whether you study or work at the sociology department that comes first, 12th or 89th in a ranking? Why does it matter whether the journal you publish in is included and ranked in a certain index, or not? Let us know your thoughts.

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Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists

Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists

Parsing federal education statistics, it turns out that prospective social scientists are the most avid consumers of humanities courses as undergrads (not counting humanities majors themselves, that is).

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National Science Board: Defining the Case for Social Science

National Science Board: Defining the Case for Social Science

UPDATING: A presentation on social, behavioral and economic sciences funded by the National Science Foundation pressed one overriding message: we matter.

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Should Self-Citation Count?

Should Self-Citation Count?

There has been much discussion over how useful citation metrics, like Google Scholar’s H-index, really are and to what extent they can be gamed. Specifically there appears to be concern over the practice of self-citation as it varies widely between disciplines. So what should academics make of self-citations? Referring back to our Handbook on Maximising the Impact of Your Research, the Public Policy Group assess the key issues and advise that self-citations by researchers and teams are a perfectly legitimate and relevant aspect of disciplinary practice. But individuals should take care to ensure their own self-citation rate is not above the average for their particular discipline.

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Beating the Flawed Metric That Rules Science

Beating the Flawed Metric That Rules Science

The perceived importance of a scientific paper should reflect the deepest wisdom of the scientific community, argues Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, rather than the judgments of three anonymous peer reviewers. So where does that leave ‘impact factor’?

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Viva Voce Podcasts: What You Do, Not What You’ve Done

Viva Voce Podcasts: What You Do, Not What You’ve Done

Make an impact! make an impact! Early career social scientists here that refrain all the time. Gemma Sou cast around for a way to give her colleagues a voice in that quest, and hit upon podcasts.

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Congress Questions Benefits of Government-Funded Research?

Congress Questions Benefits of Government-Funded Research?

Trying to measure the benefits of scientific research using traditional business-oriented metrics may not be the best tool in our shed, argues Michael White.

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