DWLresearch

Just in time for the start of term, Google Scholar has changed its design and layout. Further details are here .  There is nothing substantially new, but the settings and the advanced search have moved to the ‘drawer icon’ in the top left.  Find the advanced search and settings in the top left corner  Google Scholar provides a simple way to  search for scholarly literature - particularly journal articles. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions (USA only), from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. It is also good at taking you straight to a pdf copy, where it can. If you are off-campus, we recommend that you change the settings so that Scholar knows you are from the University of Leicester. Go to Settings, then click on Library links. Type  " University of Leicester" and clic...

The new academic year starts next week. We would like to welcome all new PhD students to Leicester, and all returning ones too. We hope you enjoy your time here.  David Wilson Library Reading Rooms There will be two events introducing the Library and its services for new research students (details below.) We look forward to meeting many of you then, or at other events this term. If you have any questions, please email: librarians@le.ac.uk  PhD Students: Introduction to the Library, reference management, and research data Are you new to the University of Leicester library? If you would like to find out more about the Library and the dedicated support we can provide for researchers, come along to these 30 minute sessions. When Oct 16, 2017 Introduction to the Library -  10:00 AM to 10:30 AM Introduction to reference management  -  10:30 AM  to  11:00 AM Introduction to research data -  11...

EndNote X8 is being made available on staff and student computers for the 2017/18 academic year. For staff computers it will be made available to install through the Program Installer. For student computers it will automatically be made available via the Start - All Programs menu. Remember - the University of Leicester license only allows EndNote X8 to be installed on University owned computers (including University laptops). If you would like to access your references at home then you can sync your EndNote desktop library with EndNote online. What's new in EndNote X8? If you're an existing EndNote user then check out the 5min video on what's new: New to using EndNote? Then check out the 5min video on EndNote's main features You can also find lots more training videos on specific features on the EndNote YouTube Channel .

Relevant data for research can turn up in some unexpected places. For example, we subscribe to a number of financial databases such as SNL , EIKON and Bloomberg . Their main purpose is to provide financial data on companies, stocks and markets. But to aid the industry analysts who use them, the databases also provide wider macroeconomic and demographic data. They even have information on infrastructure and geography.  SNL, to focus on one, is strong on US statistics and  contains t he populations, age structure,  household size and incomes, and unemployment rates of US states. This information can also be mapped, along with: World airports, cities, ports, railroads, roads and utilities Real estate mortgage information across US counties  Numbers of businesses by  NAICS classification.  Maps created can be exported, like this one of the population density of Houston: ...

During the next year we'll be starting to offer more training and advice on traditional publication metrics and atlmetrics. In the meantime there is already a wealth of altmetric data available to University of Leicester staff and researchers. Almetrics refers to the the alternative ways your research is being referred to. For example, has it been tweeted, blogged, cited in Wikipedia, picked up by news outlets or mentioned on FaceBook? There are various companies and platforms that are offering data or ways of collating this data. This post will focus on two: PlumX and Altmetric . Please be aware: Altmetrics is still a new and emerging field and not all research outputs will have altmetrics data. Altmetrics in Literature Databases You will see the PlumX Metrics icon appearing when you search some of our databases e.g. Scopus and EbscoHost. For example, this Richard III paper by Turi King et al . - you can see the PlumX Metrics option on the right of the page: ...

A few weeks ago the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH) released an open source, test version of Janeway , the software they have developed for publishing journals. At Leicester, we use a version of Open Journal System (OJS) to publish several journals associated with academic departments.  OJS is widely used by libraries who support journal publishing. In the UK, Aberdeen, Kent and UCL all use it. It fair to say that many users have a love/hate relationship with it. Editors and reviewers, in particular, find the 'back end' difficult to use. The release of Janeway, therefore, sparked our interest. From a readers' point of view, OLH journals have always looked attractive and felt easy to navigate. More than that, the release felt like another step towards a more coordinated open access publishing infrastructure. A clearer division of labour emerging where OLH concentrate on 'flipping' subscription journals to OA, and individual libraries concentrate...

If you are a researcher in the biological sciences, chemistry, digital humanities and sociology the UK Data Service and Jisc would like to invite you to participate in one of several focus groups exploring the use of FAIR data principles within UK academic research. Two free to attend workshops will be held in September, one in London and the other in Newcastle . What is meant by the FAIR Data Principles? FAIR refers to a set of guiding principles developed by a group of international stakeholders which proposes that scholarly outputs should be: Findable : easy to find for both humans and computers, with metadata that facilitate searching for specific datasets Accessible : stored for long term so that they can easily be accessed and/or downloaded with well-defined license and access conditions (open access when possible), whether at the level of metadata, or at the level of the actual data Interoperable : ready to be combined with other datasets by humans or computers Reu...