Finding and using PhD theses: free webinar
Sara Gould, Development Manager at the British Library writes:
“Using doctoral theses in your research: a guide to EThOS
EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk is the national database for PhD theses, managed by the British Library. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers, with over 100,000 UK theses freely available to download and use for your own research, and another 200,000 available to search and scan on demand.
Join us for a free webinar to learn how EThOS works.
Introductory SPSS Workshops for research students
On Monday 2nd December Paul Rice from CfAP is running the first of a series of two workshops on SPSS, specifically for research students with little or no experience of the software.
Introduction to SPSS will focus on the basic elements of quantitative research and the issues that should be considered in data analysis. The workshop will cover types of data, how this data can be entered into SPSS and will end with examining descriptive statistics. This is an application orientated session and the approach will be practical. No prior knowledge is required.
Title of workshop: SPSS part 1: Introduction to SPSS.
Where? Grendon 152, Grendon IT Centre, Park Campus
When? Monday, 2 December 2013 from 17:00 to 19:00
The follow on workshop Basic Inferential Statistics in SPSS will be held on 16th December.
BBC News asks “How broad is the research?”
The BBC news site today presents several examples of ‘unusual’ PhD work across the UK, featuring vampires, cows, and erotic shoes (in three separate examples, sadly).
DOIs and Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education
I mentioned in a previous post that the University had recently registered with CrossRef to allow us to allocate Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to published articles.
Our first use of these has been within Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education (ELEHE), the university’s first open journal. Each issue of the journal now has a DOI, as does each article within the issue. For example:
- ELEHE Volume 4, Issue 1; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14234/elehe.v4i1
- Stoncel, D and Shelton-Mayes, A. (2012) Students’ views on higher education learning environments for professional teacher education, Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education, 4(1), pp.3-16; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14234/elehe.v4i1.45
Open Access Button – breaking down paywalls
Launched on Monday, the Open Access Button is a great new tool for finding open access copies of research articles and at the same time raise awareness and gather evidence of the impact of paywalls on scholarship worldwide.
How it works:
British Library Doctoral Open Days
It’s that time of year again… the British Library are once again advertising their open days for new doctoral students. This is your opportunity to learn about the British Library’s unique research collections and how to access them.
This year the dates and subjects on offer are as follows:
Finch report: progress review published
In June of last year the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (or ‘Finch Group) published the ‘Finch report‘, describing ways and means of increasing access to UK research outputs. Amongst its recommendations it controversially argued that the sector should adopt the ‘gold’ route to open access (OA), where necessary paying article processing charges to publishers to ensure immediate access to research publications.
Within a month the Department for Business, Information and Skills (BIS) had announced its support for the Finch Group’s recommendations and Research Councils UK (RCUK) had published a new open access policy. Both parties quickly followed through with financial support – BIS made available £10 million to pump prime the system whilst RCUK announced a block grant scheme to support 107 organisations over the following two years.
Qualitative methodology days for research students
Dr Jane Callaghan will be running two 2-day workshops in qualitative methods in February and May 2014.
On February 4th-5th, Jane will be running a workshop on “Doing Discourse”, exploring the theoretical underpinnings of a discursive approach to qualitative analysis. Discursive analysis can be applied to text, visual images and ethnographic material. Throughout the two days, students will explore how language, space and visual material intersect in the production of discursive practice.
The second workshop, on May 13th-14th, will explore different forms of interpretation in qualitative research. Students will draw on phenomenological approaches, and Interpretive Interactionism, to work with a range of textual, visual and spatial materials.
Both workshops are ready for booking. They will be open to students outside of UoN so do book soon, as there are limited places. Further details can be found below, just click on the course titles for more information and to book:
Doing Discourse: 2-day workshop: Tuesday, 4 February and Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Doing Interpretive Qualitative Research: 2-day workshop: Tuesday, 13 May and Wednesday, 14 May 2014
SPECTROstar Nano machine training
Submitted by Wanda McCormick, Moulton College
On Wed 20th November 2-3pm, discipline-based training on the use of Moulton’s SPECTROstar Nano machine will take place. Research students from other Schools, for whom this is relevant, are invited to attend. The training will take place in lab H6 (Holcot site, gate 3) but please email Wanda to express an interest in attending. Read the rest of this entry
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