Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research

‘Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research: A Handbook For Social Scientists’

 now available to download as a PDF

In the past, there has been no one source of systematic advice on how to maximize the academic impacts of your research in terms of citations and other measures of influence. And almost no sources at all have helped researchers to achieve greater visibility and impacts with audiences outside the university. Instead researchers have had to rely on informal knowledge and picking up random hints and tips here and there from colleagues, and from their own personal experience.This Handbook remedies this key gap and opens the door to researchers achieving a more professional and focused approach to their research from the outset.

from: LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog 14th April 2011

Crisis in the Humanities, 2011-2012 debates

Special Report

Crisis in Humanities

Whether South Africa's humanities and social sciences will survive a university-centred and national crisis remains a controversial question. 

Collection of articles from the Mail & Guardian

State of Humanities in South Africa, 2009-2010 debates

A list of links to articles, reports, interviews etc on the status and role of the Humanities in South Africa

Includes the Mellon Report on Reforming the Humanities Ph.D. & Keith Thomas's TLS article on:

What are Universities For?

Content from the ASSAf website ( Academy of Science of South Africa)

A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

Available now: a guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

We have put together a short guide answering these questions, showing new users how to get started on Twitter and hone their tweeting style, as well as offering advice to more experienced users on how to use Twitter for research projects, alongside blogging, and for use in teaching.

from the LSEIpactBlog dated 29 September 2011

The academic career path has been thoroughly destabilised...

 The academic career path has been thoroughly destabilised by the precarious practices of the neoliberal university.

It is an increasingly difficult time to begin an academic career. The pressures of the REF, casualization and adjunctification of teaching and the disappearance of research funding are enormous obstacles academics face. Sydney Calkin looks at how academics have in many ways become model neoliberal subjects. How might we effectively challenge the growing acceptance of the unpaid, underpaid, zero hours work within universities? A ‘job’ posting circulated on Twitter and Facebook in July 2013, provoking a mix of shock, anger, and hopelessness among academics, particularly young aspiring academics.

Interesting commentary follows the article on LSEImpactBlog.