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

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

• OpenRefine
• Trifacta Wrangler

Statistical analysis

• R
• RStudio

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

• Tableau Public
• Microsoft Power BI
• RAWGraphs

Social and other network analysis

• Gephi

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.

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

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.”

CREST compiled a list of resources related to evaluation in the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a valuable resource which includes advice on continuing with your research and evaluation in this time, for example how to conduct remote surveys and qualitative data collection and how to evaluate impact in a post-Covid-19 world.

View the list here.

You are welcome to view freely available electronic resources in a library guide. Some publishers have lifted restrictions on the use of their material during this period, which are updated regularly in the guide. You will also find links to open access journals and university presses who opened access to their digital books, such as Wits University Press and African Sun Media. The guide also provides links to research related to COVID-19, according to the different publishers who made it available.

Do you want to increase the visibility of your research? Do you want to spend your time on research and not on reporting? Do you have a common name and have problems with distinguishing your research from another with the same name? A persistent name identifier could address these challenges. ORCID  is a persistent, unique, numeric identifier for individual researchers and creators.

The Library will host another online workshop next Wednesday, 15 April (12:30-13:30), to show you how to create your ORCID iD, how to connect it to the Stellenbosch University integration and how to populate it with your publications and other works.

Please register here and the presenter will forward you the information on how to connect to this presentation .