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Showing posts from September, 2019

Meet the Library Research Services Team & Autumn PGR/Staff Training

Meet the Library Research Services Team When: Thursday 24 Oct 2019, between 10:30 to 13:30 Where Digital Reading Room, Library Come along to the Library Digital Reading Room for a cuppa and an informal chat with the Library Research Services Team. Find out about using the library, the services we offer to PGRs and explore the roles of the team. Library tours will also be available on the day. This session is aimed at new PGRs, but all PGRs and researchers are welcome to come along and chat to us. Drop-in session any time between 10:30am-1.30pm The University Library Research Services team supports the university's research community throughout the research lifecycle by providing a range of services, tools, resources and training to help meet our institutional and individual research priorities and activities. We provide PhD students and researchers with training and help in these areas: ·         Information research skills and capabilities ·         Reference m

Peer Review Week 2019: Digest for PhD students and early career researchers

This week has been the 5th annual Peer Review Week. The subject of peer review is discussed all year round, but it's been fascinating to observe the focussed discussion this week on the theme that gets to the heart of the issue: Quality. Peer Review has long been a cornerstone of academic publishing and a signifier of quality, but evidence of bias towards positive findings and spotlights on flaws , in general, have come to light over the years. The increased workload on academics, pressures on early career researchers to publish or perish and a lack of recognition for reviewers has also resulted in questions about the sustainability of peer review. Technology inevitably is involved in generating possible solutions to these challenges, but at what cost to quality? This post will summarise some of the contributions to these topics that have been made this week. Types of Peer Review.  http://reviewers.plos.org/open-peer-review/ It's a common misconception that there

Using Zotero for projects

Do you need to share references with collaborators? Or make a bibliography available to a wider audience? Or crowd-source information about publications or objects? Then you may find Zotero's Groups functions useful. Zotero is software that helps researchers and students to organise references and cite them. It works in similar ways to other products like EndNote, RefWorks and Mendeley. It is distinctive however, in being run on a nonprofit, open-source basis.  As well as having a personal reference library, you can also create Groups where you share references with others. Groups can be restricted or very open. There are three types: ' private', 'public  closed' or 'public open'. Y ou can control the ability of others to edit records in the group.     Users can search, sort and browse the references and export citations if they wish. They can  read any notes or tags that have been saved. In private or closed groups, attached files can be shared, but t