scholarly journals Quality of Social Science Research in India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Shovon Ray ◽  
M. Parameswaran ◽  
Manmohan Agarwal ◽  
Sunandan Ghosh ◽  
Udaya S. Mishra ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Keyword Search ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Quality Of Research

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.

Social Science Research in India

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Reference Database ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Quality Of Research

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.

Return to Meaning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Alvesson ◽  
Yiannis Gabriel ◽  
Roland Paulsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
No Value ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Cluttered Environment ◽  
Student Fees ◽  
Social Uses

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.

Anthropology, Empathy, and the Need for Social Science Communication

2021 ◽  
pp. 107554702110188
Author(s):  
Jennifer Shannon ◽  
Claire Quimby ◽  
Chip Colwell ◽  
Scott Burg
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research

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.

Measuring the Unmeasurable? Taking Stock of QoG Measures

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-114
Author(s):  
Nicholas Charron
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Quality Indicator ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Scientific Impact ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Future Work

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.

scholarly journals Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Doherty ◽  
Kate Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Material Quality ◽  
Precarious Labor ◽  
The Relationship

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.

scholarly journals Can we Trust Science and, if so, Why?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wuttke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Open Science ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Research On Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Knowledge Claims

The trustworthiness of scientific findings is at the center of current scholarly and public debates. The contestation of scientific knowledge claims is reason to take a break from our every-day tasks as scientists and to reflect upon our doing as professional truth-seekers. This essay reviews two recent books on foundational and practical questions on the scholarly generation of knowledge. 'Why Trust Science' (Oreskes) is an intellectual expedition into the epistemological foundations of science. 'Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research' (Christensen, Freese, Miguel) is the first book-length primer on contemporary Open Science debates in the social sciences. Together, these books demonstrate the range of what we can learn from the new wave of ‘research on research’, both as curious citizens and as academic scholars.

“I’m an Expert on Public Space”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon C.C. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
History Of ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Official Sources

Chapter 4 focuses on the personal and professional background of many do-it-yourselfers who employ sophisticated knowledge of professional planning and scholarly urbanism in their interventions. In doing so, it begins to challenge binary notions of formality and informality in urbanism. The chapter includes discussion of the history of informality in cities and the development of professionalized urban planning and placemaking practices. It then discusses how many do-it-yourself urban designers have professional design training that they to use in their projects. Where others lack such a background, they often seek information from official sources in order to strengthen and legitimate their interventions, from tools, techniques, and guidelines to justifications grounded in social science research. Although this may lead to better-designed and more effective improvements, it also gives the individuals a certain confidence in the quality of their actions and their right to make them.

Turtles All the Way Down? — On a Quest for Quality in Qualitative Research

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke Meulenberg-Buskens
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Research Guidelines ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Reflective Discourse ◽  
Quality Of Research

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.

scholarly journals Challenges in Education Research in Taiwan: Research Institutes and Organizations, Research Policies, and Problems

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1&2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia Li Huang
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Research Performance ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Academic Education ◽  
Research Institutes

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.

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