Workshop: Keeping Track of Your Reading

Despite a coy wireless signal, there was a researcher support session Thursday morning on Keeping Track of your Reading, a guide to staying on top of relevant news, research topics and authors. You can find the links, slides and some of the content here. 

Please join us for the next session on using social media to improve the reach and impact of your research and shape your scholarly digital footprint. 25 February at 9:00AM.

New Database of Psychological Experiments

Are you incorporating psychological experiment results into your research? You might find some interesting results in Psychological Experiments Online. YSJ recently began a subscription to this database, which describes itself as

"a multimedia collection of over thirty important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the Stanford Prison Experiment, Pavlov's dogs, Halo effect and the Bystander effect. The database includes video clips, website links, interviews with psychologists, suggestions for classroom activities and access to supporting theories and literature."

The Bobo Doll  Experiment. Image taken from Psychological Experments Online.

I find the database fascinating, even if it has (as yet) has no bearing on my own research. Beware, you may start clicking on the collection relating to Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment of 1961 (which 'demonstrated that children will model their behaviors on those they have seen even without any reinforcement or encouragement') and find you've spent an hour unexpectedly exploring the study of aggression in humans. Ooops. Enjoy.

Discover Discover

This week sees the return of our ILS researcher support sessions. The first one in the programme is Discover Discover, a guide to getting the most out of our main search tool.  Would you like to know how to save searches, personalise the settings or export your results?  This is the session for you.  We will be on the ground floor of Fountains at 9am on Wednesday 4th February, so pop along if you would like to find out more.

Measuring Research Impact with Web of Science

Measuring a researcher's or an article's impact, influence and reach is tricky and will look different across disciplines and institutions. It's a good idea to rely on a wide variety of tools and measurements for analysing the amount that research has been cited in the scholarly literature or otherwise discussed on social media or in the popular press.

One traditional way of analysing a scholarly author's impact  or the impact of scholarly research outputs is to create a Web of Science citation report. Web of Science creates this by documenting instances of where peer reviewed research appears in its database and where it has received a citation in another scholarly source in its database. You can also create a Web of Science author report which includes the number of results found in the Web of Science database, the sum of the times cited, average citations per item and author's h-index .

The tool is not suitable for measuring the impact of creative work or for examining the impact of research beyond the scholarly literature. With those caveats in mind, it's an interesting exercise to create the reports to see how much, where and when an author or a piece of research has been cited. Google Scholar also offer Google Metrics, which claims to do the same thing. Pick your poison!



If you're interested in these types of metrics, MyRI offers a great 3-part module on measuring your research impact. They call it an open access toolkit and the module will introduce you to all kinds of tools.

Measuring research impact

We had the great pleasure of addressing the Postgraduate Research Supervisor's Forum today. We talked about measuring research impact: both traditional methods and methods of measuring that looked beyond the academy. The presentation is below:

Measuring Research Impact from YSJ_ILS

A makeover for our databases page

We've redesigned our databases webpage so you can filter by subject or see the whole list alphabetically. Short descriptions of each resource are included, which might introduce you to tools you've never used before. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think.

NVivo Training this Thursday 15/01

Are you using qualitative methods to collect research data? NVivo is a software package that helps you manage, code and analyse qualitative data such as interviews, survey responses, photos, video, Twitter streams and more. There will be a 60 minute introduction to NVivo on Thursday 15/01 at 1:00PM in FT114 with an optional 30 minutes at the end for you to work hands-on with your own data (or the sample data provided). If you'd like to book in, please contact Annette Webb.