Maximising the impact of academic research

Identity in the Digital Age: Reading List for #LSELitFest

Join us this weekend for a free event on Digital Personhood and Identity as part of the LSE Literary Festival. Panellists Luke Dormehl (@lukedormehl), Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray), Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk), and Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) will be presenting a mixture of research and reflection, each exploring what affect our digital landscape and our digital lives have on the foundations of our identity. The […]

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February 27th, 2015|Featured, LSE Comment, Research Ethics, Social Media|0 Comments|
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    Emma Uprichard: Most big data is social data – the analytics need serious interrogation

Emma Uprichard: Most big data is social data – the analytics need serious interrogation

In the final interview in our Philosophy of Data Science series, Emma Uprichard, in conversation with Mark Carrigan, emphasises that big data has serious repercussions to the kinds of social futures we are shaping and those that are supporting big data developments need to be held accountable. This means we should also take stock of the methodological harm present in many big […]

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February 12th, 2015|Big Data, Data science, data series, Research Ethics|1 Comment|
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    What is the difference between ‘doing Digital Humanities’ and using digital tools for research?

What is the difference between ‘doing Digital Humanities’ and using digital tools for research?

Tara Thomson shares her experience attending a participant-driven ‘unconference’ for digital humanities students and scholars. The event format aims to be democratic, aligned with how the Digital Humanities has aimed to build itself on devolved authority. But disciplinary knowledge is not always equally shared. The discussions highlighted problems of access and exclusion as primary concerns for the field. Some felt excluded from the Digital Humanities as […]

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February 11th, 2015|Academic communication, Research Ethics|3 Comments|
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    Why Inaccessibility? Despite progressive tone, attacks on academics’ lack of clarity can be profoundly regressive.

Why Inaccessibility? Despite progressive tone, attacks on academics’ lack of clarity can be profoundly regressive.

It has become popular to denounce academic writing as elitist and unhelpful. Eric Detweiler argues that inaccessibility may be a more complex issue. “Inaccessible” writing may be the result of  an author trying to do things with language that conventional, “clear” uses of language cannot. Furthermore, these critiques are often launched at marginalised fields that are writing in non-standard […]

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December 11th, 2014|Academic writing, Impact, Research Ethics|2 Comments|
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    Book Review: Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research edited by Donatella della Porta

Book Review: Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research edited by Donatella della Porta

This collection aims to offer a practical, how-to approach to researching social movement studies, with each author writing on a method they have used extensively in their own work. Leonardo Custódio is impressed by the book’s invitation to researchers to reflect about different approaches to studying mass demonstrations, protests, and other forms of collective action for socioeconomic and political change.

This piece originally appeared on LSE […]

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December 7th, 2014|Book Reviews, Research Ethics|0 Comments|
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    Replication is not about making or breaking careers: it is about providing an opportunity to move science forward.

Replication is not about making or breaking careers: it is about providing an opportunity to move science forward.

Replication and closer scrutiny of published findings are generally welcome in the scientific community, but questions have been raised over how replication attempts are being reported. Whilst there are certainly arguments for more friendly and cooperative tones to scientific debate, Dorothy Bishop welcomes this next chapter in rigorous debate. Reputation and career prospects will, at the end of the day, […]

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October 16th, 2014|Academic communication, Impact, Research Ethics|0 Comments|
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    How competitive should science be? External reward structure may inhibit creative thinking and innovation.

How competitive should science be? External reward structure may inhibit creative thinking and innovation.

Competition for funding and jobs is often cited as a helpful mechanism for spurning innovation and productivity in science. But Jessica Polka challenges this idea by drawing from the results of an experiment known as Duncker’s candle problem. The experiment revealed external rewards can actually inhibit creative thinking. If science is like the version of the candle problem, are […]

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September 22nd, 2014|Impact, Research Ethics, Research funding|0 Comments|
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    Reconceptualising risk in research: The call to do no harm goes far beyond the field.

Reconceptualising risk in research: The call to do no harm goes far beyond the field.

A session at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference will explore the physical, emotional and reputational risks involved in doing research, with the hope that this will in turn, provide a starting point for a more comprehensive framework for understanding how risk operates. Amiera Sawas will be co-chairing the session and writes here on her experiences with risks in […]

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August 26th, 2014|Academic communication, Research Ethics|3 Comments|
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    Patenting of life-saving drugs has created a global health crisis where human life has become a commercial commodity.

Patenting of life-saving drugs has created a global health crisis where human life has become a commercial commodity.

Millions of people—mostly in developing countries—lack access to life-saving drugs. Righting this imbalance is among the most important challenges of global public health of this century, argues Akansha Mehta. There is scant evidence to prove that frameworks for intellectual property rights and patent protection have benefited research, development and innovation in developing countries. When the laws of trade and commerce override the human […]

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August 6th, 2014|Evidence-based Policy, Government, Open Access, Research Ethics|6 Comments|
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    Neglecting to confront conflicts of interest in industry-sponsored research unfairly burdens early career researchers

Neglecting to confront conflicts of interest in industry-sponsored research unfairly burdens early career researchers

As public funding shrinks, industry-sponsored research may be a remedy. But Rebecca Cassidy reports back from a workshop on how the pressure caused by scarcity of funding and conflicts of interest in certain fields falls disproportionately on early career researchers, the most vulnerable members of the higher education precariat. Those who have yet to build up the social capital which comes […]

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July 24th, 2014|Academic communication, Evidence-based Policy, Impact, Knowledge Transfer, Research Ethics|1 Comment|
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    Scientific Misbehavior in Economics: Unacceptable research practice linked to perceived pressure to publish.

Scientific Misbehavior in Economics: Unacceptable research practice linked to perceived pressure to publish.

Upholding research integrity depends on our ability to understand the extent of misconduct. Sarah Necker describes her landmark study on economists’ research norms and practices. Fabrication, falsification and plagiarism are widely considered to be unjustifiable, but misbehaviour is still prevalent. For example, 1-3% of economists surveyed admit that they have accepted or offered gifts, money, or sex in exchange for […]

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July 23rd, 2014|Academic communication, Academic Publishing, Citations, Evidence-based Research, Research Ethics|5 Comments|
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    On Taxis and Rainbow Tables: Lessons for researchers and governments from NYC’s improperly anonymized taxi logs.

On Taxis and Rainbow Tables: Lessons for researchers and governments from NYC’s improperly anonymized taxi logs.

When New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission made publicly available 20GB worth of trip and fare logs, many welcomed the vast trove of open data. Unfortunately, prior to being widely shared, the personally identifiable information had not been anonymized properly. Vijay Pandurangan describes the structure of the data, what went wrong with its release, how easy it is to de-anonymize […]

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July 16th, 2014|Academic communication, Big Data, Government, Research Ethics|0 Comments|
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    The Outing of the Medical Profession: Data marathons to open clinical research gates to frontline service providers.

The Outing of the Medical Profession: Data marathons to open clinical research gates to frontline service providers.

Could greater data transparency across the medical field solve the problem of unreliable evidence? Dr. Leo Anthony Celi charts the efforts to improve the publicly available MIMIC database, a creation of the public-private partnership between MIT, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Philips Health-Care, through a series of data marathons. Data scientists, nurses, clinicians and doctors are coming together to collaborate and answer clinically […]

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July 15th, 2014|Academic communication, Big Data, Evidence-based Policy, Research Ethics|0 Comments|
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    Maximising the value of research data: developing incentives and changing cultures

Maximising the value of research data: developing incentives and changing cultures

The value of sharing research data is widely recognised by the research community and funders are setting in place stronger policy requirements for researchers to share data. But the costs to researchers in sharing their data can be considerable and the incentives are sometimes few and far between. A recent report from the cross-disciplinary Expert Advisory Group on Data […]

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July 1st, 2014|Academic communication, Research Ethics, Research funding|1 Comment|
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    Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.”

Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.”

Over the coming weeks we will be featuring a series of interviews conducted by Mark Carrigan on the nature of ‘big data’ and the opportunities and challenges presented for scholarship with its growing influence. In this first interview, Rob Kitchin elaborates on the specific characteristics of big data, the hype and hubris surrounding its advent, and the distinction between data-driven science and empiricism.

What […]

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June 27th, 2014|Academic communication, Big Data, Data science, data series, Evidence-based Research, Government, Research Ethics, Social Media|10 Comments|
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    Publicly available data from Twitter is public evidence and does not necessarily constitute an “ethical dilemma”.

Publicly available data from Twitter is public evidence and does not necessarily constitute an “ethical dilemma”.

An article in Scientific American suggests further ethical considerations should be made for research derived from Twitter data. Ernesto Priego questions first the extent to which Twitter will actually release all of its valuable data and also argues archiving and disseminating information from Twitter and other public archives does not have to be cause for an “ethical dilemma” so long […]

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May 28th, 2014|Academic communication, Evidence-based Research, Research Ethics, Social Media|9 Comments|
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This work by LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.