LSE Impact Blog

Drawing on a study of priorities in health research, Moumita Koley, PhD, Ismael Rafols and Alfredo Yegros argue a metascience approach can refocus Indian research towards areas that are most needed by Indian society and that are understudied globally. #Metascience #ResearchPolicy #ResearchFunding

Discussing a new project to mobilise research based knowledge for public health, Liz Such, Andy Tattersall, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall outline how local government, civil society groups and researchers can collaborate in mutually beneficial ways to unlock the impact of existing research. #KnowledgeMobilisation #ResearchImpact #ResearchFunding NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research)

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There is a long history of attempts to unify and rationalise academic research. Taking the example of VINITI, the Soviet Union’s centralised approach to organising global research, Björn Hammarfelt and Johanna Dahlin explore how an organisation that at its height employed tens of thousands, provides a parallel and precursor to contemporary challenges in scholarly communication. #ScholComm #OpenAccess #Preprints #STS

The emergence of an open access publishing system based on article publication charges has introduced substantial global inequities. Stephanie Kitchen, David Mills and Mame-Penda Ba argue that for African research to have local and global influence requires a focus on ‘Afrostructuring’, the creation and maintenance of African scholarly publishing infrastructures that derive from and serve the needs of African researchers. #OA #AcademicPublishing #ScholComm Global Africa

The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research. #ResearchMethods #QualitativeResearch #HigherEducation (LSE Methodology & LSE Department of Economics)

Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions in economics. Ria Ivandic and Anne Sophie Lassen assess the impact of having children on men and women’s career trajectories and suggest how the sector can adapt. #Academia #AcademicParents #ChildPenalty #Economics

Based on an analysis of over 32 million abstracts published over the last fifty years, Adrian Barnett and Nicole White find a marked rise in common spelling errors. Evidence they suggest of a culture of quantity over quality in academic writing. #AcWri #AcademicPublishing #Statistics

International development agencies apply theories and methodologies from a largely Western canon. Reflecting on how feminism became a contentious term for groups involved in a participatory action research project in Southeast Asia, Francesca Earp considers how theories shape methodologies, practices and ultimately relations of power between researchers and research participants. #DevelopmentResearch #SocialScience #ParticipatoryActionResearch

“First and foremost, we must improve training in computing and computational methods for social scientists. Algorithms, bots, and robots have become an indelible part of the social and social scientists should be able to speak “their language” to study and understand them.” And, I would argue that we must also improve training for computing scientists, engineers, and other disciplines in social research methods. We need diverse, interdisciplinary research teams, embracing various methodologies, working on these significant research problems.