Journal impact factors
FAQ: What is a journal impact factor and why does it matter?
A journal’s impact factor is used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal in its field. The higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal. From a researcher’s point of view, ‘high impact’ journals are usually perceived to be the ‘best’ and most career enhancing places to be published.
The impact factor is a statistical measure; a journal with a high impact factor will have received more citations than one with a low impact factor.
Research Methods: Distance learning workshops on Nile are available now!
Available on Nile are the excellent Epigeum online workshops in “Research Methods”. There are workshops in each of the following areas – Social sciences, Arts, Science and Literature Review. Go to “RES001: Postgraduate Research Training” and choose “Online Research Training” from the left-hand menu.
Introducing research data management
Reporting on this event: Research data clinics – 30th October
Yesterday’s visit by Sarah Jones and Marieke Guy from the DCC gave a dozen or so Northampton researchers the chance to find out a bit more about the benefits and challenges of managing research data.
Blogs added, blogs wanted
We’ve added some new university staff and researcher blogs to our blogroll in the right-hand column:
At History at The University of Northampton Dr. Drew Gray and the history staff are posting on a variety of interesting topics including crime and punishment, Northampton Castle, motherhood in the media and political strategy.
Cotswold History is the blog of PhD researcher Nell Darby and focuses on the social history of the Cotswolds region, with posts on cautionary tales, local eccentrics, magic lanterns and everyone’s favourite, murder walks.
Professor Mike Redwood is a seasoned blogger whose posts on the global leather industry date back to 2007. He has recently posted from the Netherlands, Shanghai, Germany and everyone’s favourite, Northampton on leather and its relation and relevance to the University of Northampton.
These new sites join our existing link to the blog of Professor Jeff Ollerton, whose diverse posts revolve around biodiversity by way of creationism, architecture, post-everything activism and everyone’s favourite, toilet seats.
If you’re a blogging PhD or staff researcher we’d love to add your site to our list – please contact Nick with the details.
Main image: Writing ball keyboard by Sverre avnskog (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Thumbnail: Underwood Keyboard (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Disseminating your Research Workshop – book now!
New Ways to Disseminate your Research: Social media
Thursday, 1 November 2012 from 14:00 to 17:00
T-Pod, Rockingham Library, Park Campus, University of Northampton
This workshop describes some of the tools that may be used to disseminate research to a wider audience. It will introduce a range of social media, including professional networking tools (e.g. LinkedIn; Academia.edu; ResearchGate; Mendeley), blogs (e.g. Blogger; WordPress) and microblogs (e.g. Twitter).
Book now at http://dissresnov12.eventbrite.co.uk/
RefWorks induction 2012: notes and links
This is a follow-up post to the research student induction RefWorks training, with notes on the session and some useful links. Those of you who attended the attempted session will be amused (hopefully) to learn that the authentication problem was fixed shortly after everyone went home, and RefWorks logins are now working as they should.
NELSON and RefWorks – capturing your references
FAQ: How can I save items from NELSON to my RefWorks account?
NELSON is Library and Learning Services’ new resource discovery tool. It searches across a range of services including journals (full-text and abstract), ebooks and the library catalogue.
While researchers often benefit from searching databases directly, one advantage NELSON offers is a standard interface for several functions and services, including RefWorks, the University’s reference management software. RefWorks lets you collect, manage, share and annotate your references, and helps you cite them in Word. Whatever you find in NELSON, exporting it to RefWorks is quick and painless. In this post I’ll show you how to copy single and multiple items from NELSON into your RefWorks account.
Open Access Week October 22-28, 2012 Everywhere
Promoting free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of scholarly and research outputs, this week marks the 6th annual international Open Access Week.
Here at The University of Northampton there are plenty of opportunities for researchers to make their work available in an open access format…
Developing methods for the microanalysis of online data
Date: 9-10 January 2013
Venue: Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Workshop fee: none. Lunch and dinner (day 2) and coffee/tea are included. Read the rest of this entry
“What’s Happiness in Hamlet?”
Dr Richard Chamberlain will be giving his research seminar, “What’s Happiness in Hamlet?” at 1pm on Tuesday 23rd October in MY 120. Please come along: Read the rest of this entry
UON Graduate School Blog 
