The Production of Knowledge: Enhancing Progress in Social Science

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?

Colin Elman is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry in the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. He co-founded (with Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University) the Qualitative Data Repository.

John Gerring is Professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin. He serves as co-PI of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and the Global Leadership Project (GLP).

James Mahoney is the Gordon Fulcher Professor in Decision-Making at Northwestern University, where he holds appointments in Political Science and Sociology.  He is founding director of the Comparative-Historical Social Science (CHSS) program at Northwestern.