Research Institutes in SSR

Author(s):  
Satyakam Joshi ◽  
Sadan Jha

Research institutes engaged in social science research (SSR) constitute an important component of research infrastructure. The data is collected for 311 research institutes including autonomous institutes, government institutes, and research and advocacy groups. The data shows that the average size of faculty in 148 autonomous institutes was seven. It may not be too farfetched to say that such tiny faculty strength will have direct impact on the volume as well as quality of research output from these institutes. ‘Economics and allied subjects’ leads the research in autonomous institutes. In the case of government-run institutes, the research component is weak as their focus is mainly on training and capacity enhancement of government and another staff. Research and advocacy groups have focused primarily on advocacy.

Social science research (SSR) has a vital role in enriching societies, by generating scientific knowledge that brings insights—even enlightenment—in understanding the dynamics of human behaviour and development. For social sciences to realize their potential in shaping public policy, it is imperative that the research ecosystem is dynamic and vibrant; the institutions governing it are robust and effective; and those producing quality research are strong and well governed. This volume elaborates on various dimensions of SSR in India, presenting a strong case for designing a comprehensive national social science policy which can meaningfully strengthen and promote a research ecosystem for improved public policymaking in the country. Addressing issues like lack of funding, availability of data, infrastructure, and quality of research output, it will serve as a national benchmark and reference database for social sciences in India.


Author(s):  
Amit Shovon Ray ◽  
M. Parameswaran ◽  
Manmohan Agarwal ◽  
Sunandan Ghosh ◽  
Udaya S. Mishra ◽  
...  

The chapter analyses the quality of research in terms of quality of articles and of journals by using a quality index. It uses two-dimension indicators to judge the quality of articles, that is, citations (scholarly) and readership, which is the number of hits an article receives in a simple Google keyword search. The quality of a journal is measured in terms of three dimensions: its presence over time, its presence across space, and its depth. The study took 21351 journal articles from 1006 journals (902 journals from Scopus and 104 journals from ISID for five-year period, 2010–14. It emerged that India’s social science research (SSR) contributes more to public debates and policy formulations and relatively less in pushing the frontiers of knowledge for further research.


1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke Meulenberg-Buskens

This article focuses on the relationship between the personal and the scientific in qualitative research discourse as an aspect of the quest for quality. While there is of necessity a personal dimension in any type of social science research, in qualitative research the personal takes a prominent place in that the researcher's subjectivity is explicitly used within the research context and appropriated by the methodological discourse. The purpose of methodological discourse is to safeguard the quality of research: Guidelines are developed, innovations are discussed, and traditions and conventions maintained. Methodological discourse can also be the arena where a community of scientists asserts itself through discussing its members' practices. It is here where personal authority and scientific convention meet in the battle for research quality. The case study used here reflects a particular event in a qualitative methodological discourse which was a crisis of sorts. An attempt is made to analyse the process which revealed the prevalent rules and the question is raised whether the quest for recognizability, which is the basis of methodological discourse operating within a community of scientists, has the potential to function as a threat to the quest for quality, so undermining its very purpose. A plea is made for a multi-layered reflective discourse where not only individual work will be scrutinized, but the discourse will scrutinize itself with the help of individual events.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1&2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia Li Huang

Since the 1990s, many education researchers and policy makers worldwide have reviewed education research to attempt to provide strategies to improve the quality of such research in their countries. Taiwan’s government has launched policies and funded support to set the benchmark for Taiwan’s leading universities in international academic competition. The external environment of global competition based on research policy influences the ecosystem of social science research production. To assure the quality of education policy, peer review from within the education community is one approach to supplementing the government’s governance, including the establishment of research institutes, promotion, rewards, and research value. This study tracked the mode of academic research and provides an overview of the status of academic education research in Taiwan. Because education research is part of the humanities and social sciences fields, this study identified the challenges in educational research by examining the trend of social science research and by analyzing research organizations, policy, and the evaluation of research performance. Due to the environment of education research in Taiwan is not friendly to education researcher to accumulate papers in SSCI or international journal, additional concerns entail how education research communities can develop and agree on its quality.


Author(s):  
Mats Alvesson ◽  
Yiannis Gabriel ◽  
Roland Paulsen

This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but a proliferation of meaningless research of no value to society and modest value to its authors—apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the limelight even briefly. Older, but more impressive contributions are easily neglected as the premium is to write and publish, not read and learn. The result is a widespread cynicism among academics on the value of academic research, sometimes including their own. Publishing comes to be seen as a game of hits and misses, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value and of no wider social uses whatsoever. This is what the book views as the rise of nonsense in academic research, which represents a serious social problem. It undermines the very point of social science. This problem is far from ‘academic’. It affects many areas of social and political life entailing extensive waste of resources and inflated student fees as well as costs to taxpayers. The book’s second part offers a range of proposals aimed at restoring meaning at the heart of social science research, and drawing social science back, address the major problems and issues that face our societies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003072702110242
Author(s):  
Max Rünzel ◽  
Paolo Sarfatti ◽  
Svetlana Negroustoueva

When evaluating Quality of Science (QoS) in the context of development initiatives, it is essential to define adequate criteria. The objective of this perspective paper is to show how altmetric and bibliometric indicators have been used to support the evaluation of QoS in the 2020 Review of the Phase 2-CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs, 2017–2022), where, for the first time, the Quality of Research for Development (QoR4D) frame of reference has been utilized across the entire CGIAR CRP portfolio. Overall, the CRP review showed a significant output of scientific publications during the period 2017–2020, with 4,872 articles, 220,101 references, and 7.1 citations per article. Additionally, wider interest in scientific publications is demonstrated by good to high altmetrics, with average attention scores ranging from 70.8 to 806.9 with an average of 425.1. The use of selected bibliometrics was shown to be an adequate tool, for use together with other qualitative indicators to evaluate the QoS in the 12 CRPs. The CRP review process clearly demonstrated that standardized, harmonized and consistent data on research output is paramount to provide high-quality quantitative instruments and should be a priority throughout the transition toward One CGIAR. Therefore, we conclude that the QoR4D framework should be augmented by standardized bibliometric indicators embedded in measurement frameworks within the new One CGIAR. Finally, its practical utilization in monitoring and evaluation should be supported with clear guidelines.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107554702110188
Author(s):  
Jennifer Shannon ◽  
Claire Quimby ◽  
Chip Colwell ◽  
Scott Burg

This is a call to science communicators and science journalists to feature social science research and researchers in their reporting, with an emphasis on anthropology and its potential to increase public empathy, improve the quality of public discourse, and contribute to contextual and narrative news trends.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Charron

This chapter discusses a wide scope of the available indicators of quality of government. It begins with a brief history of the development of the indicators and their scientific impact on social science research. The chapter posits a typology of the various ways in which indicators of governance can differ and implications of such differences. The chapter then reveals the degree to which contemporary cross-country indicators of corruption in particular correlate. Next, several well-established critiques of contemporary data are presented. The chapter concludes with several comments on what makes a good quality indicator and puts for several suggestions for future work in this ever-growing field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Doherty ◽  
Kate Brown

AbstractWaste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.


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