Suchergebnisse

In the social sciences it is largely impossible to substantiate statements about research excellence with reliable indicators for international benchmarking of fields and institutions. Governments that must decide how to use taxpayer money to support social science research would like statements of research excellence intended to influence distribution of resources to be backed by evidence widely considered to be objective. Even social scientists who accept this premise are often extremely uncomfortable with emerging evaluation systems. In this essay, I accept the value of evaluation. However, I reject the idea that sociological research should be distorted until it fits into an evaluation system of convenience. Currently, systems can be established without due regard for the nature of the scholarship they are evaluating. Thus incentives can be established that will likely change scholarship in potentially damaging ways. I argue that the nature of sociological and other social science research needs to be understood and respected and then evaluation systems designed that do not distort scholarly research. My argument is based on a review of studies examining social science publishing, particularly in comparison to publishing in the sciences.

Interviews with researchers in two fields of condensed matter physics point to differences in their strategies for success. In one, synthesizing interdisciplinary knowledge takes priority over developing sophisticated instrumentation; in the other, developing instru ments is crucial. As a result, the fields differ in other ways, such as growth rates, presence of dilettantes, and freedom available to plan experiments. The differing priority given to instrumentation in each field suggests that blanket generalizations about advances in instrumentation being crucial to advances in science are too simple.

The New York Times ( NYT) receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This article explores the reasons why scholars cite the NYT so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the NYT very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a mode 2 type of scholarship produced in the context of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable, and aiming to be socially useful as well as high quality as assessed by peers.

Scholars and practitioners in public administration have often been referred to as the two communities, reflecting their differing incentives, constraints, and foci. In this paper, we examine the knowledge surrounding the use of empirical evidence in public decision making from both the academic and practice of policymaking literatures. After identifying points of convergence, we compare the important factors identified in each literature to four known cases of impact of empirical findings. We discuss how well each set of literature explains our cases and identify an important third community underidentified in the current conceptualizations of evidence translation—knowledge intermediaries.