CIVICA Research Open Science for the Social Sciences Seminars – Presenting Research Results Well for Maximum Openness

Presenting Research Results Well for Maximum Openness

After spending years developing projects, collecting data and conducting analysis, many researchers often still spend comparatively little time thinking about how they can best present their results. A legacy belief is strongly shared by some older researchers and inculcated still in ‘elite’ universities – that academic ‘results should speak for themselves’ and that spending time on producing polished charts, graphics and tables is an unnecessary extra that undermines the seriousness of the research.

Yet how results are presented matters a great deal – first and foremost for researchers’ own understanding of what they have found. The challenge of explaining well to people unfamiliar with what has been done is a key stage in researchers really getting on top of and deep-understanding their own results. Effective data presentation smooths the path to publication and enormously enhances the citations, academic impacts and also practical impacts of that work thereafter. It can also help inform the understanding, reasoning and analysis of the data for both the author and their readers.

In the past two decades, there have been huge leaps forward both in putting scientific research into data visualisation and the tools that researchers can use to create sophisticated and effective graphics themselves. This presentation provides an introduction to how to improve the communication of your results and achieve open social science research that is widely accessible to academic and non-academic readers alike. Presentations are also increasingly critical for the public face of research, and increasingly shape researchers’ public reputations and career prospects.

Tuesday 14 November 2023  –  12:00-13:00CE

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