Standing on the shoulders of giants

The ¿standing on the shoulders of giants¿ metaphor is often used to acknowledge the work of others when undertaking research and stresses the importance of literature reviews in scientific inquiry. The general concept of the course is to reflect on theories and concepts, and even methodology, that have served as an inspiration for the course participants and on which they are building their current re-search.

The general learning objective of the course is to critically appraise the perspectives, topics, theories, and methods used by the participants. Literature reviews, including meta-analysis, will be presented and discussed. The PhD candidates (and supervisors) in GHIG belong to psychology as well as other disciplines such as public health, health promotion, gender studies, social anthropology and child pro-tection (barnevern). Therefore, some of the activities in the course are discipline/topic specific, de-pending on the background and topics of the participants.

Questions and topics to be addressed in the course include:

• What progress has been made in social sciences and psychology¿ and what exactly is progress?
• How does progress work in scientific research: Is it something that happens gradually, is it cu-mulative or a breakthrough?
• Has there been actual progress in the field of relevance for the participants or is it stagnant? Have there been setbacks?
• Does a field kick in doors that have stood wide open for years?
• Reflections about how and why citations are included in literature reviews, e.g. issues related to only including publications from the last 10 years, when older work may be more appropri-ate.
• The frames around research: How do funding opportunities and university structures influence what research we do. How do these boundaries and resources control the focus of research.
• The pitfalls of publish or perish. Challenges related to different strategies for publishing and ci-tations, such as choice of journals and the threats to scientific quality imposed by the huge in-crease in predatory journals and journals in the grey area.

After completion of the course, the candidate

• Has knowledge about how to assess scientific progress in psychology and social sciences.
• Has knowledge of fundamental principles of scientific quality in research and dissemination.
• Has knowledge of possible challenges, boundaries and resources for scientific progress.

Skills

After completion of the course, the candidate

• Can reflect critically on the history of their own field, work, and project, including scientific progress.
• Can reflect critically on the strategies they use in literature review and meta-analysis.
• Can assess the quality of scientific journals in their field and choose appropriate journals for publish-ing their work.

General competence

• After completion of the course, the candidate
• Can reflect upon how progress in social science is relevant for their own PhD project, and in fulfilling their social responsibility of communicating research findings in accordance with good research prac-tice and ethical principles.