For years political scientist Gary King has argued and preached for a restructuring of the social sciences that would include “larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams” with big data analysis in their DNA. "The key reasons social sciences are moving from studying problems individually… to the scientific model where we’re actually solving problems, is because of the community. It is much easier to fool ourselves than it is to fool our community.” - Gary King

"Big data and mathematical models aren’t inherently bad... it depends on the way it’s used, by whom, and in service of what outcomes." says Katie Metzler. Against backdrop of media stories warning us about big data and its dangers, SAGE Publishing hosted a panel debate as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science panel entitled  “Putting big data to good use” at the British Academy in London where Katie Metzler leads the discussion.

Kristel Alla, Wayne Hall, Harvey Whiteford, Brian Head and Carla Meurk find that academic literature discusses research impact but often without properly defining it. The authors highlight four core elements that comprise most research impact definitions and propose a new conceptualization of research impact relevant to health policy.

Getting data is becoming more and more of an issue and is unfortunately leading to consequences in academia. Disagreements that were usually solved with data are now getting lost due to the the little publicly available data on social media sites. This is a significant change to how social science researchers are gathering their data that professor Henry Farrell says is "badly understood."

Researchers are increasingly encouraged to make their data openly accessible and usable for others but to early-career researchers in particular, this can seem daunting.  Katherine Wood has compiled a short open data starter guide to make the process less overwhelming and help researchers do their bit for reproducibility.

Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. In this post from the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, Wasim Ahmed offers his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data.

Katherine Wood, a graduate student in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Psychology Department and advocate for open science, walks through a basic overview of how to overcome and accomplish some operations commonly encountered when initially getting a data set. "By generating the data yourself" she says, "you can make your life easier by saving it in the format you want." She explains step by step multiple ways to accomplish this and highlights packages that will make things easier for anyone with similar issues.