Impact of Social Sciences – Research Ethics

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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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

September 22nd, 2014|Impact, Research Ethics, Research funding|0 Comments|

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Physician, Heal Thyself: A brief manifesto on kindness in academia and the tyranny of legitimacy.

Physician, Heal Thyself: A brief manifesto on kindness in academia and the tyranny of legitimacy.

Under the rouse of rigour and seriousness, professional norms in academia often preclude kindness. Jason Laker looks at the issue systemically in an effort to uncover why being kind and supportive to each other should be seen as surprising. He wonders how much of this contemptuous rhetoric is authentic, or rather, a performance used to socialize academics as a […]

September 19th, 2014|Higher Education, Public Engagement, Research Ethics|2 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

July 15th, 2014|Academic communication, Big Data, Evidence-based Policy, Research Ethics|0 Comments|

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The Philosophy of Data Science (series) – Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.”

The Philosophy of Data Science (series) – 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 […]

June 27th, 2014|Academic communication, Big Data, Data science, Evidence-based Research, Government, Research Ethics, Social Media|7 Comments|

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The Power of Experts: How does the justice system handle the shifting domain of expertise in the courtroom?

The Power of Experts: How does the justice system handle the shifting domain of expertise in the courtroom?

Ahead of the closing session for Law on Trial 2014, Renata Salecl reflects on the role and authority of expertise in the justice system. She argues which experts we rely on very much depends on today’s media and the comforting fantasies they offer supporting the efficacy of science and of its empirical neutrality. But error and fraud also play a significant role and […]

June 20th, 2014|Academic communication, LSE Comment, Public Engagement, Research Ethics|0 Comments|

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Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom.

Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom.

Ahead of the March Against Slaughterhouses taking place worldwide this weekend, Stevan Harnad combines lessons from cognitive science and ethics in order to lay bare the widespread problem of the human treatment of animals. Ethics and law are predicated on the existence of feeling and as such reducing and eventually abolishing gratuitous suffering that humans are inflicting on animals is hence one of the most […]

June 13th, 2014|Academic communication, Public Engagement, Research Ethics|0 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 […]

May 28th, 2014|Academic communication, Evidence-based Research, Research Ethics, Social Media|8 Comments|

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Book Review: Insider Research On Migration And Mobility: International Perspectives on Researcher Positioning, edited by Lejla Voloder and Liudmila Kirpitchenko

Book Review: Insider Research On Migration And Mobility: International Perspectives on Researcher Positioning, edited by Lejla Voloder and Liudmila Kirpitchenko

Bringing together the latest international scholarship in the sociology and anthropology of migration, this volume explores the complexities, joys and frustrations of conducting ‘insider’ research. In this book, the authors set out to offer analyses of key methodological, ethical and epistemological challenges faced by migration researchers as they question the ways in which they come to identify with their research topic […]

April 6th, 2014|Academic communication, Book Reviews, Research Ethics|0 Comments|

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Book Review: Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student’s Guide, 2nd Edition, by Rose Barbour

Book Review: Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student’s Guide, 2nd Edition, by Rose Barbour

In this book, Rose Barbour sets out to provide a clear, user-friendly introduction to the craft of doing qualitative research. The author’s writing style and the inclusion of numerous anecdotes from her own research, simultaneously demystify qualitative research whilst reiterating the expertise and skill which researchers must possess, writes Christina Dobson. Christina recommends this book to anyone undertaking qualitative research, postgraduate students in particular.

This review originally […]

March 16th, 2014|Book Reviews, Evidence-based Research, Research Ethics|0 Comments|

Cultivating an ethos of openness through research integrity

Regardless of the rhetoric about more openness in academic research, institutions appear to be failing to address some of the deeper issues. In order to stave off the steady rise of regulation and monitoring and to present a coherent alternative to instrumental views about research, it falls to researchers themselves to define the ethos of openness. Andrew C. Rawnsley discusses the moral substance of claims about […]

February 25th, 2014|Academic communication, Academic Publishing, Open Access, Research Ethics|3 Comments|

The case for greater transparency in experimental and social science research

Proving public value can be an especially difficult task when high-profile cases of fraud in social science disciplines emerge. Rose McDermott makes the case for greater transparency in both the production and review of social science to restore the legitimacy of the scientific endeavour. While no one practice can eliminate fraud, greater transparency can make it both more difficult to […]

January 31st, 2014|Academic communication, Academic Publishing, Evidence-based Research, Impact, Research Ethics, Research funding|2 Comments|

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