... For researchers, this matters more than one thinks because funders are increasingly looking for a real return on their research dollars, euros and pounds. For example, the Ford Foundation, the second largest in the US, expects grantees to “achieve the greatest possible impact”; EU Horizon 2020 Proof of Concept grant applicants must outline the economic and/or societal impact expected from the project; and the UK’s REF, in assessing applications, gives a 25 percent weighting to the ‘reach and significance’ of impact. But what is impact and how can you generate it?

Those who do finish their PhDs face a highly competitive academic employment market, as the number of annual PhD graduates exceeds the number of available academic openings in all but a few specialized areas of study. Universities are increasingly aware of this imbalance. But their responses are slow and uneven. Our research helps to explain why, and we argue that PhD students must take their own initiative to prepare for diverse career outcomes.

Let's look at some of the research articles readers found interesting in 2019!

I’ve just got back from a fantastic workshop looking at infrastructure for research data discovery. I’ll blog about the workshop in due course, but I was asked to comment on Google Dataset Search (GDS). I had the chance to meet with Natasha Noy from Google who is behind the service. 

As with many Google services, it has been created by a small team, but with the underlying web-scale infrastructure of Google to build on top of. They look for data sets on the web that have been identified using Home - schema.org tags. Data repositories that expose these tags will get indexed by GDS (this includes both Figshare and DataDryad).

Research dissemination is essential if you want others to learn about and use your findings.

Our study, whose preliminary results we recently presented at the 2019 SISP (Italian Political Science Association) Conference, examines the visibility of the tweets posted by Italian political leaders during the last EU Elections campaign. We show how crowd-sourced and spontaneous political action, triggered by a social media game, can take an almost social bot-like nature and significantly boost the visibility of tweets by political leaders during a major political event.

Back in February, I had the privilege of attending Social Science Foo Camp, a flexible-schedule conference hosted in part by SAGE at Facebook HQ where questions of progress in the age of Big Data were a major topic of discussion. What I found most insightful about these conversations is how using or advocating for Big Data is one thing, but making sense of it in the context of an established discipline to do science and scholarship is quite another.

Text data are a resource that we are only beginning to understand. Many human interactions are moving to the digital world, and we become increasingly sophisticated in documenting interactions. Face-to-face encounters are replaced by written communication (e.g., WhatsApp, Twitter) and every crime incident or hospital visit is recorded. All of these interactions leave a trace in the form of text data.

Social media can be beneficial or distracting. Need a break?

Today's academic writers need to think about more than writing. Media and social media extend our reach.

2014 was the year that the digital media company Upworthy “broke the internet” in the words of cofounder Peter Koechley. By publishing positive, progressive news stories and optimizing them with A/B testing, Upworthy came to dominate online attention.

In the last few years, a huge amount of scholarship has emerged on disinformation and related topics, such as toxicity, polarization, populist rhetoric, and election interference. Researchers in disciplines from anthropology to psychology are working on disinformation-related questions, often with different taxonomies. This volume makes it hard for researchers to stay abreast of other disciplines. Seemingly contradictory findings present challenges for journalists, citizens, and policymakers seeking clear answers.  

MediaWell, the Social Science Research Council’s new web platform, is a response to this volume and spread – our aim was to create a one-stop platform that is freely accessible for researchers, policymakers, journalists, funders, and interested citizens alike. We’re excited to make the project available, and eager for feedback on this new format for curating research and promoting public scholarship.