Information School News

In 2017 the London School of Economics and Political Sciences Impact Blog received a total of 1,412,929 page views. PhD student Wasim Ahmed built on his 2015 post, which was also ranked among the top read, with a follow up post in 2017. The post was titled: Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017) . The post was ranked amongst most viewed in 2017 as well as being featured in the round up of top posts about communicating research with social media . In 2017 Wasim Ahmed represented the Information School at an expert panel at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) on the importance of promoting research beyond academia. Wasim Ahmed noted that engaging with blog led to increased page views, citations, and interest inside and outside academia related to Wasim’s PhD.

Extract taken from the LSE Impact blog: Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval functionalities. Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. You can read the full post here .

A blog post written in collaboration with Information School PhD student Wasim Ahmed , and, the Head of Digital at the University of Sheffield, Stephen Thompson has been published on the LSE Impact blog .  Featured image credit: irfanahmad1989 ( pixabay public domain ) The blog looks at why organisations are adapting their processes to incorporate social media for crisis communications, and provides a practical overview of the social media tools that can be used to monitor and track crisis communication issues that may arise.

A blog post from the Information School's Professor Stephen Pinfield has been published on the LSE Impact Blog . Stephen's post entitled ' Enabling authors to pay for open access – The Gold Open Access market and the role of an institutional central fund' discusses examines how institutional central funds have enabled authors to pay open access OA) article-processing charges (APCs). The post considers how institutional funds may have facilitated adoption of OA from 2006 to 2014 and the full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here.   Further information on the research can be found in the research article published by Professor Stephen Pinfield and Chris Middleton (2016). Researchers’ adoption of an institutional central fund for open-access article-processing charges: A case study using Innovation Diffusion Theory. SAGE Open. doi: 10.1177/2158244015625447

A recent blog post has been published on the LSE International Development blog written by Dr Christopher Foster (The Information School) and Dr Shamel Azmeh (LSE). The post entitled 'New Trade Conflicts and the Race for Technological Leadership in the Digital Economy' considers how laws, technologies and trading rules shape the Internet. It discusses the emergence 'digital industrial policy' in middle income countries and consequently how new trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) are attempting to reshape digital information flows and digital data. The full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here . This post accompanies the release of an LSE working paper "The TPP and the digital trade agenda: Digital industrial policy and Silicon Valley’s influence on new trade agreements”, by Shamel Azmeh & Christopher Foster which can be found here .