Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service - News from research support services

Author: Marié Roux (Page 10 of 13)

How to complete your ORCID record

You have created your ORCID iD, but now what ? Which steps do you need to follow to keep your record up to date?

The following two videos might assist and guide you through this process. (See also the specific timings for each step below):

ORCID video

Contents of this video (2:10 minutes)

  • What is ORCID?
  • Who are integrating with ORCID? (00:15)
  • Examples of integrations (0:27)
  • Benefits of using an ORCID iD (00:39)
  • Where to use your iD (00:52)
  • How to create and connect your iD to SU identity (01:05)
  • Demonstration (01:18)
  • How to populate your record (01:44)
  • Help (01:59)

Populate your ORCID record

Contents of this video (about 13 minutes):

  • Add a biography (00:23)
  • Add your employment (00:53)
  • Add your education (01:29)
  • Add invited positions and distinctions (01:49)
  • Add membership and service (02:42)
  • Add funding (3:46)
  • How to add your works (publications and other works) (06:08)
  • Add works via Google Scholar (10:11)
  • How to add aliases, keywords, websites, social media links (12:05)

More help

Preprints and Research Square

Research Square has partnered with Dimensions to provide early citation data on preprints. It lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal.

About Research Square

Research Square is a division of the Research Square Company, and exists to make research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. The preprint platform, launched in 2018, is a  large, author-centric preprint server that brings transparency to the peer review process. Through the journal-integrated In Review service, innovative author dashboard, manuscript assessments, and research promotion services, they enable researchers to share their research with the broader community,and receive useful feedback much earlier in the publication process.

https://www.researchsquare.com/researchers/preprints

https://www.researchsquare.com/journals (See the list of participating journals)

Also read this blogpost and view the short recording  of a webinar on “the role of preprints in elevating trust in peer review”.

Policy on self-archiving of research output

Do you know about the SU Policy on Mandatory Self-archiving of Research Output, which was approved in December 2014?

The policy requires that full-text copies of published journal articles or conference proceedings of SU research output be hosted in the institutional repository, SUNScholar .

The following versions of your articles may be submitted to the repository (all in compliance with the policy of the publisher):

  • Publisher’s version
  • Post-print (final peer-reviewed manuscript with the incorporation of revisions)
  • PDF of peer-reviewed conference paper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-archiving

You may contact your Faculty Librarian who will  be able to submit on your behalf, or submit your research output yourself by sending an e-mail to scholar@sun.ac.za, requesting to register as a submitter. The steps are also set out on our help page. One individual may also submit on behalf of a department after they have been registered and have all the necessary information to complete the citation.

Library guide on tools and applications for research

Did you know that one tab of the Research Process library guide is dedicated to tools and applications for research? This page takes through the research process and highlights useful tools and applications which you may find helpful while going through the different steps of doing your research. It includes planning tools, conceptualisation tools, note taking, surveys, links to other library guides and tools for data analysis. Just to mention a few.

Explore the guide on your own here.

You are welcome to contact us if you need  assistance with any of the tools listed here.

Useful link: Also see Nicole Hennig’s  Best apps for academics

New platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles – scite

A new platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations, scite, has seen the light.

Their deep learning model classifies each citation context automatically. The numbers show how sure it is of a classification and categorise it in three different contexts, Supporting, Mentioning, Contradicting.

Josh Nicholson writes about how to use scite (see an extract below):

… in order to truly identify what research is reliable or not, we need to access every scientific article ever written. Fortunately, leading academic publishers like Wiley, The British Medical Journal, Karger, Rockefeller University Press, and others have started to share these with scite. Some have even started to display scite information directly on their articles.

We’re excited about the possibilities of bibliometrics to help scientists and non-scientists understand science better and would like to invite researchers to use our data (for free) to perform their own studies.

Download the Chrome extension and see this information popping up automatically while browsing scientific articles.

It is interesting to see that Eugene Garfield predicted this kind of service in 1964, in an article titled Can citation indexing be automated?

Slide from demonstration about scite on 30 June 2020, by Josh Nicholson

Data analysis software

Did you know that Campus IT has made available a Software Hub where you will find all the software available under the University’s site licenses? It’s available on a public Sharepoint site, where you can download the software and see How-to-guides. It consists mostly of data analysis software such as Mathematica, SAS, SPSS, Statistica and Matlab.

 

 

It is also important to be aware of free data analysis software. Here are some examples:

Data cleaning
Statistical analysis
Qualitative analysis
  • Dedoose (Free for first month, thereafter you only pay a minimal amount in the months that you actually use the tool)
Data visualisation applications and tools
Social and other network analysis

Free COVID-19 portal on Pure

Elsevier made available a free COVID-19 portal on Pure. It is possible to identify potential research collaborators in areas related to the coronavirus epidemic.

You can search a set of researchers and research institutions whose prior publications indicate potentially relevant expertise related to the novel coronavirus. The following categories are available to conduct your search: researcher profiles, researcher units, relevant research, datasets and media items about the research.
See more information on how to use this portal.

How can you improve your impact as author/researcher?

Earlier this week the Library presented a workshop on Maximising your research impact. You are welcome to view the powerpoint here, but herewith also a short summary of important steps to take:

Make sure to publish strategically

  • Carefully take note of the Instructions to Authors of the specific journal
  •  Be careful of predatory publishers
  • Publish Open Access, not only your final product, but also your research data (SUNScholarData), code (Github), software, presentations(Slideshare), working papers
  • Journal metrics: Use Web of Science or Scopus for analysing journal metrics in order to make sure you publish in a high impact journal (Journal Impact Factor, Citescore, SNIP, Scimago Journal Rank, etc)
  • Make sure the journal is accredited to receive subsidy from the DHET
  • Create a unique author identifier to ensure that you are able to track citations to your research and that your research can be found continuously (ORCID library guide)

Measure your author and article impact

  • Citation analysis is a way of measuring the impact of an author, an article, by counting the number of times that author, article or publication has been cited by other works.
  • Use different author metrics and not only the H-Index (G-Index and M-Index for example)
  • Also consider other aspects of a candidate’s career, such as discipline, and how many collaborators a researcher works with, etc.
  • Remember to measure your social media posts, media mentions, readers, downloads of articles, etc. with Altmetrics (Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics in Scopus and Ebsco, ImpactStory, etc)

Networking: Know how to find collaborators

  • ResearchGate
  • Academia
  • Social Science Research Network
  • Mendeley
  • LinkedIn

Promote your work with Social Media and other public engagement

  • Actively make time for public engagement
  • Use Facebook, Twitter to promote your research
  • Start a blog or personal website about your research/research group
  • Learn about which research will make the news: Newsworthy-infographic

Other useful reading on the topic:

Maximizing your Research Impact

And:

Taylor and Francis’ author guide

University of Berkeley Library Guide


Need any assistance?

Contact: Marié Roux

Does the H-Index matter?

Recently two articles on the H-Index caught my attention. The one, What is wrong with the H-Index? is about how Jorge Hirsch, the creator of the H-Index, criticized the current use of it. And the other was a case study on how the University of Groningen handles research impact services. They moved away from  using the journal impact factor (IF) and the H-index, and started to use article-level metrics such as field-weighted citation impact (FWCI).

What is the H-Index?  It is a metric that takes into account both the number of papers a researcher has published and how many citations they receive. It has become a popular tool for assessing job candidates and grant applicants. The formula on how it is calculated:  the number of publications for which an author has been cited by other authors at least that same number of times.

According to the above article Jorge Hirsch wrote in January 2020 in the Physics and Society newsletter that the H-Index can “fail spectacularly and have severe unintended negative consequences”.

Hirsch asked hiring committees and funding agencies to not only rely on the H-Index, but also to consider other aspects of a candidate’s career, such as discipline, and how many collaborators a researcher works with.

“One has to look at the nature of the work,” … “If you make decisions just based on someone’s H-index, you can end up hiring the wrong person or denying a grant to someone who is much more likely to do something important. It has to be used carefully.”

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