Transforming Indigenous / Non-Indigenous Research Partnerships: A Comic for Researchers
This comic you can use illustrates positive strategies research teams can use to create good working relationships.
Webinar recording and Q&A: Software tools in social science and humanities research
At the end of last year, Dr. Daniela Duca (Product Manager for SAGE Ocean), hosted a webinar to discuss findings from our white paper on The Ecosystem of Technologies for Social Science Research. Daniela discussed who is developing research tools, who supports and funds them, the challenges they are facing and other trends from more than 400 tools in this space.
Science is Shifting Toward Collaboration. So Why Don't We Teach More Collaboration?
The way that science is done is changing. More and more, research is conducted in collaborative teams, pulling together scientists from a variety of areas of experience and geographic locations. This is particularly true in environmental sciences, where the types of complex, multifaceted issues faced by society can only be addressed by bringing together researchers with multiple perspectives. Across a wide range of fields, there is evidence that multi-authored research is more highly cited, suggesting that this shift in the culture of science is producing novel and exciting results...
Is Novelty in Science a Distracting Obsession?
In a survey of over 1,500 scientists, more than 70 percent of them reported having been unable to reproduce other scientists’ findings at least once. Roughly half of the surveyed scientists ran into problems trying to reproduce their own results. No wonder people are talking about a “reproducibility crisis” in scientific research...
Stop, collaborate listen: Gender equality in social data science. Watch the panel discussion now
And talking about gender equality in social data science means talking about the representation of women in tech and attitudes towards women in tech. It means confronting the stubborn prejudices and perceptions that women can’t code or can’t do stats. It means having a discussion about how as this new community of thought and practice is forming, we have a chance to make it look different than the communities that came before. And in particular, it seems vital to challenge ourselves to do so because of the questions social data scientists are asking and the methods they are using - because of the danger of biased algorithms, of reinforcing inequality through policies based on big but dirty data.
Metaphors for Thinking about Qualitative Researchers’ Roles
How do researchers' roles vary in different kinds of qualitative studies?
Passion about Research Process (not output!)
My hand trembled with nervousness and anticipation. It was the start of my student research project. My supervisor had talked me through how “by doing X we will learn more about Y” and I was excited to get started.A decade later when I talk to my own students I sometimes catch myself using another way to frame our work: “if we do X, and it ‘works’, then perhaps we can get into prestigious journal Y”. This is poison for an inquiring mind...
What (social) Factors Make For an Innovative Researcher?
One might ask why researchers go to the effort of undertaking unconventional, path-breaking work? What makes some scientists more likely to engage in research that breaks from tradition, despite the risks? In our recent study, we considered two possible explanations. First, we thought that scholars affiliated with high-status demographic...
From preprocessing to text analysis: 80 tools for mining unstructured data
Text mining techniques have become critical for social scientists working with large scale social data, be it Twitter collections to track polarization, party documents to understand opinions and ideology, or news corpora to study the spread of misinformation. In the infographic shown in this blog, we identify more than 80 different apps, software packages, and libraries for R, Python and MATLAB that are used by social science researchers at different stages in their text analysis project. We focused almost entirely on statistical, quantitative and computational analysis of text, although some of these tools could be used to explore texts for qualitative purposes.
Roles & Skills for Research Outside of Academia
Julie Reeder discusses research roles and skills needed for work in a government setting.
Researchers Roles: A Big Picture
Research skills involve more than being about to design and conduct a study.
It's time we involve citizens in the AI revolution
With intelligent machines increasingly playing a role in our daily lives, there is a need to involve the public in conversations around the social implications of new technologies. A new public-private initiative to involve citizens in understanding the social implications of AI could unite society under the banner of safeguarding core human values whilst improving AI literacy.
Integrity: The Most Important Research Practice
A commitment to integrity in all phases of research is essential to credibility for the field, as well as to the researcher.
2019 Hits: Research Ethics
While some journals are most interesting to those within a discipline, the open access Research Ethics Journal is relevant to researchers across disciplines.
2019 Hits: The International Journal of Qualitative Methods
What was most read and cited from the
2019 Hits: Big Data and Society
As 2019 draws to a close, we're highlighting relevant open access articles that attracted readers' attentions this year. Learn what interested Big Data & Society readers.
2019 Hits: Methodological Innovations
As we close out 2019 on SAGE MethodSpace, let's look at some of the most read and cited open access posts. In this post, find sources from Methodological Innovations.
Book Review: The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism
The age of Big Data has frequently been framed as a new frontier in human life, presenting both brand new opportunities and brand new challenges. In The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias articulate an alternative view: the quantified world in which we now live is a product of the continuation and expansion of both colonialism and capitalism: not a new frontier, but the inevitable expansion of an existing one.
Want to Generate Impact? Get Creative.
... 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?