The Production of Knowledge: Enhancing Progress in Social Science (Strategies for Social Inquiry)

✍ Scribed by Colin Elman (editor), John Gerring (editor), James Mahoney (editor)

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 580
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Whilst a great deal of progress has been made in recent decades, concerns persist about the course of the social sciences. Progress in these disciplines is hard to assess and core scientific goals such as discovery, transparency, reproducibility, and cumulation remain frustratingly out of reach. Despite having technical acumen and an array tools at their disposal, today's social scientists may be only slightly better equipped to vanquish error and construct an edifice of truth than their forbears – who conducted analyses with slide rules and wrote up results with typewriters. This volume considers the challenges facing the social sciences, as well as possible solutions. In doing so, we adopt a systemic view of the subject matter. What are the rules and norms governing behavior in the social sciences? What kinds of research, and which sorts of researcher, succeed and fail under the current system? In what ways does this incentive structure serve, or subvert, the goal of scientific progress?

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Detailed Contents
1. Introduction
Part I Discovery
2. Exploratory Research
3. Research Cycles
Part II Publishing
4. Peer Review
5. Length Limits
Part III Transparency and Reproducibility
6. Transparency and Reproducibility: Conceptualizing the Problem
7. Transparency and Reproducibility: Potential Solutions
8. Making Research Data Accessible
9. Pre-registration and Results-Free Review in Observational and Qualitative Research
Part IV Appraisal
10. Replication for Quantitative Research
11. Measurement Replication in Qualitative and Quantitative Studies
12. Reliability of Inference Analogs of Replication in Qualitative Research
13. Coordinating Reappraisals
14. Comprehensive Appraisal
15. Impact Metrics
Part V Diversity
16. Whats Wrong with Replicating the Old Boys Networks
17. Ideological Diversity
Part VI Conclusions
18. Proposals
References
Index