Category Archives: Library
Managing your research data – forthcoming workshops
As part of our ongoing engagement with the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) we have arranged the following workshops:
- Managing data through the research lifecycle
- Managing your PhD research data
- Research Council requirements for data management
All sessions will be led by experts in data management from the DCC.
Increasing your citation count – a how-to guide
FAQ: How can I ensure my work is highly cited?
As a researcher there are a number of ways you can give your citation counts a boost, here are some suggestions.
Content is key
- Produce a piece of well written, top quality, original research. This is essential.
Another one bites the dust…
There are a number of potentially useful reference management tools on the web – Mendeley, CiteULike, Zotero and Connotea spring to mind. The best of these offer a range of other services, such as full text uploads, social bookmarking and a variety of other networking opportunities for researchers.
But can you trust these sites? Will your data be secure and are you sure that you will be able to access them when you need to?
Library & Learning Services (LLS) Advisory Panel
Avenue Library
As part of our commitment to meeting the real needs of students we want to recruit Advisors to sit on a new LLS Advisory Panel, where you will help to shape the services, resources, environments and future of LLS.
Commitment would be mainly via a NILE forum, where we would ask for comments on a wide range of issues, but we will also hold occasional, informal Panel lunches. Discussion points might cover anything from the split between silent and group work areas in library buildings, opening hours, e-books versus print, how we communicate with students, how best to target study and information skills sessions or what makes a good NILE site.
No special qualifications are needed and you will not be representing anyone’s views but your own. All we ask is that you are interested in shaping how we support your studies and are committed to joining in the discussion.
So, if you would like to make a difference and enhance your cv at the same time, please give your name and email address to the desks at either library or email Chris Powis, Head of Library and Learning Services (chris.powis@northampton.ac.uk) to register your interest.
Assessing journal quality – alternatives to JCR
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is the definitive source for journal impact factors, probably the most widely recognised quality indicators for journals. But what do you do if your subject area is not well covered by JCR or you would like to see some alternative metrics?
There are a number of tools available. These use a combination of citation analysis, peer review and ranking algorithms to facilitate the evaluation of journals in a range of subject areas.
Renewing your Zetoc Alert
FAQ: My Zetoc Alert is about to expire. How can I renew it?
Anybody that uses Zetoc Alerts to keep up to date with research literature will know that once a year these expire and have to be renewed. This is a straightforward process and simply involves clicking on one of the links given in the reminder email.
The trick is to click on the correct link.
The digital story of the nativity
Social media, web and mobile technologies offer a new slant to an old story:
(ExcentricPT, 2010)
The Graduate School, RSBO and the LLS Research Support Team wish all Research Support Hub readers a peaceful and happy Christmas and the very best for 2013.
Top seven predictions for the future of research
Sarah Porter, head of innovation at the JISC, knows that technology is moving fast and believes that it will have an ever-increasing influence on the way researchers work. She and Torsten Reimer have come up with seven predictions for the future of research: Read the rest of this entry
RefWorks updated
We’ve updated our Harvard UoN referencing style to fix an issue with formatting for book sections (a missing space between the author details and the date of publication).
Users will need to add the new version of the style to their RefWorks profile – please see our Hub post on restoring the Harvard UoN style for instructions.
New resource: Journal Citation Reports
Good news! The University now has a subscription to the sector’s leading tool for assessing the impact and prestige of scholarly journals: Journal Citation Reports (otherwise known as JCR).
Based on citation data from journals indexed by Thomson Reuters, JCR calculates and reports the impact factors that are boasted of and aspired to by publishers and editors of academic journals. For researchers, they can provide a rough and ready measure of journal quality and answer the oft-asked question of “where should I publish if I want my work to have the highest impact?”.
UON Graduate School Blog 