DWLresearch

January 2021 has been a very busy start to the year for the Library Research Services Team. We have been out and about (well, in a virtual environment only 😊) engaging with some of our internal and external stakeholders and communities. These are always really useful events to be part of, as it really helps to hear the conversations around research activities, challenges, and successes, both locally and in the sector.  A couple of highlights of our engagement activities Team attendance at the University of Leicester College of Life Sciences ECRs and Research staff meet the Deans event Delivering an introduction to RDM training session for the Central England NERC Training Alliance (CENTA) Doctoral Training Partnership Co-delivering a presentation  Figshare Fest 2021  with Professor Panos Vostanis  on our University of Leicester case study on research data management (RDM) and sharing research outputs. Check out Professor Panos's blog  and The World Awareness fo...

Over the Summer of 2019, two studies were published investigating commonalities in highly cited papers. If you've ever wondered how to give your article a boost and attract more readers - read on - this post will summarise the findings. Of course, there is no magic formula or quick-and-easy route to guarantee a highly cited paper. Ultimately, a paper is cited as a result of its content contributing something new or significant to a field of research. However, as the rate of publishing scientists and academic publications rises each year, the struggle is real for the early career researcher seeking to simply get their work read! The insights from Mohamed Elgendi (The University of British Colombia) and Nicholas Fraser (ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) et al make for interesting reading. Picture from Pixabay.com under  Pixabay License 5 features of a highly cited article Elgendi analysed 100 highly cited and 100 lowly cited articles from 202 open-acc...

Open Access Week has traditionally focussed on Open Access to publications, which has been a catalyst to address the transformation of scholarly communication more broadly. Our OA Week celebrations included a screening of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship , a very insightful film that reminds us why so many people across the globe believe what a difference Open Access will make to knowledge, getting us closer to an equal society. Many significant figures from the OA movement are included in the film, and it struck me that some are willing the discussion to broaden out , to transform other aspects of research in need of also being open. Terms used to capture the broader need for openness beyond publications include Open Science / Open Knowledge / Open Research . In the interest of keeping this post as inter-disciplinary as possible I'm going to opt for using the phrase Open Research here. Those who have stepped one foot into a University or research environment knows tha...

Earlier this week I blogged about how Open Access broadens out readership beyond academia and recommended investigating Altmetrics, which offer a really useful insight into the conversations that take place online between audiences. Today's post delves a little deeper into a possible link between Open Access, Altmetrics and citation count. Image credit: [citation needed] by  Dan4th Nicholas CC BY 2.0 The correlation of Open Access publication and an increased citation rate has been well-established, from +36% (Biology) to +600% (Agricultural Sciences). It's been interesting since then to observe how the Open Access landscape has evolved to include Altmetrics into the citation equation. Studies have found a short-term spike in the attention received by articles that have been Tweeted by the journal publisher, others have linked Altmetrics attention to a citation count higher in Open Access (OA) articles than in Non-Open Access (NOA) articles. However, the causali...

Those who advocate Open Access recognise that a scholarly work has the potential to interest a broader audience, academic and non-academic. It may come as a surprise who takes an interest outside of the author's immediate network, but consider the amount of primary research taking place outside of academia and it may not be such a surprise after all. For example, a reader with access to articles and data working in a  business' research and development department could accelerate innovation and discovery at pace, much faster than the time it could take to accrue one citation. Open Access is about not putting a barrier between the person who might want to access it and the research itself. (Dr Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester)  Non-academic audiences could unlock the potential for real-life impact by pushing and promoting literature to different communication channels. Other examples of non-academic audiences are journalists, citizen scientists, medical patients ...

Our second talk in this year's Research Elevenses is: Introduction to SciVal – Research Performance Metrics Tool Wednesday 31 st  January 11am, Consultation Room, Doctoral College Reading Room, 1 st  Floor, David Wilson Library Dr William Farrell SciVal is one of the leading tools for research evaluation. Using data from Scopus and other sources it allows you to analyse publication and citation metrics, patent data, grant information and media impact. You can benchmark yourself, your institution or your research group against comparable peers. Plus many more features. This session will introduce you to some of the basic functions of SciVal and how it is useful for understanding research performance. Link to webinar:  https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/677ac91fbae84f82828b2b9dd6479b9a