All 29 entries tagged Information Skills

Being organised with your information: Evernote is one useful tool.

Follow-up to Recording information when literature searching from Library Research Support

Organising your information is something absolutely imperative for researchers. There are lots of tools out there to help, and researchers all like to organise things in their own ways, so no one tool is going to suit all researchers. This means that you either have to investigate every new thing (ridiculous!) or listen to someone else's experiences and bear things in mind for one day when you might have a new need. This blog post is about my experiences with tools for organising stuff. I have a new need because I am preparing to leave the University of Warwick (30th April). Another experience many researchers will go through, as changing institution is very much a part of career progression for many.

In the past, I have blogged a few ways to be organised with your references, and have had guest posts from colleagues about reference management tools before, too.

I wrote here recently about organising bookmarks using online tools, and how I liked Diigo. Once or twice on this blog I have also mentioned Evernote, and that's the tool I'm currently playing with because it's been recommended by researchers at Warwick.

What I like about Evernote is that I can forward e-mails into it, and I can set it up to mirror folders on my computer so that all my e-mails and documents are tagged and accessible in the same place. I can also clip items from the web and create a copy of them to refer to later, and of course I can use my tags for them too. So I can get material from whichever source all into the same tagging system which is great, because I keep having to replicate my folder structures and it's much better to have all my re-usable stuff in one place, and tagged properly. Tags are sooo much better than folders, too, because you can have more than one per item!

I've been busy clipping my own blog entries into Evernote because this is a bit of an open notebook, and all my entries are tagged: I use this material when preparing workshops and presentations. Now I can just look on Evernote for my own blog entries, emails etc, and stuff I've clipped that has been written by others, all on the same theme. Plus, if Warwick ever decides to delete this blog after I've left, I'll have my own copies of my blog entries on Evernote.

I can use Evernote in at least three different ways:

1. By logging into my account on the web.
2. By opening up the software installed on my computer.
3. By using the Evernote App on my phone.

I think that all three are going to be handy.

I will probably still use my folders, but Evernote provides a way of collecting items for a particular project or need, whilst also creating copies of them which is a kind of back-up for me.

I do wish that I could import all my bookmarks into Evernote from Diigo: that doesn't seem to be possible. But perhaps it is better to use both tools. I expect that I'll maintain my web bookmarks collection for when I want to record a whole website, but perhaps use the Evernote web clipping tool for when it's a particular page that I'm interested in, and that will also help me to overcome the problem of broken links that I get with my bookmark collection, because if the content is clipped then I will still be able to read it!

There might even be times when I will want to both bookmark on Diigo and clip onto Evernote, because Evernote is my own store, but Diigo is a route I use to share stuff with others. Incidentally, I don't have lots of network contacts on Diigo itself as a way of sharing, but I Tweet things that I bookmark on Diigo. I don't actually use Diigo's own feature for tweeting an item because it involves too many clicks and steps from me each time I bookmark. Instead, I've used IFFT (If this then that) to set up a rule for Diigo items to get automatically tweeted. But that is all about sharing my information and this blog post is meant to be about organising it! So many tools serve more than one purpose.

I expect that for proper research articles that I collect, I'll always want to use a reference management tool as well. Because they can create proper references for me by importing metadata and they can create lovely formatted references for me when I write anything formal, too. And they can do networking and sharing things, and "shout about my profile" things too.

Evernote isn't quite the "one ring to rule them all" for me to organise my information. But that's probably a good thing because I'd hate to rely on one tool for everything and then have it crash or want to bill me a small fortune for using it! And by using other tools as well, I get the benefit of all their other features for sharing and profile-raising.

Jenny Delasalle : 01 Mar 2013 13:00 |  Tags: Information Skills Literature Search Research Skills Researchers Tools |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Being organised with your information: Evernote is one useful tool.

Follow-up to Recording information when literature searching from Library Research Support

Organising your information is something absolutely imperative for researchers. There are lots of tools out there to help, and researchers all like to organise things in their own ways, so no one tool is going to suit all researchers. This means that you either have to investigate every new thing (ridiculous!) or listen to someone else's experiences and bear things in mind for one day when you might have a new need. This blog post is about my experiences with tools for organising stuff. I have a new need because I am preparing to leave the University of Warwick (30th April). Another experience many researchers will go through, as changing institution is very much a part of career progression for many.

In the past, I have blogged a few ways to be organised with your references, and have had guest posts from colleagues about reference management tools before, too.

I wrote here recently about organising bookmarks using online tools, and how I liked Diigo. Once or twice on this blog I have also mentioned Evernote, and that's the tool I'm currently playing with because it's been recommended by researchers at Warwick.

What I like about Evernote is that I can forward e-mails into it, and I can set it up to mirror folders on my computer so that all my e-mails and documents are tagged and accessible in the same place. I can also clip items from the web and create a copy of them to refer to later, and of course I can use my tags for them too. So I can get material from whichever source all into the same tagging system which is great, because I keep having to replicate my folder structures and it's much better to have all my re-usable stuff in one place, and tagged properly. Tags are sooo much better than folders, too, because you can have more than one per item!

I've been busy clipping my own blog entries into Evernote because this is a bit of an open notebook, and all my entries are tagged: I use this material when preparing workshops and presentations. Now I can just look on Evernote for my own blog entries, emails etc, and stuff I've clipped that has been written by others, all on the same theme. Plus, if Warwick ever decides to delete this blog after I've left, I'll have my own copies of my blog entries on Evernote.

I can use Evernote in at least three different ways:

1. By logging into my account on the web.
2. By opening up the software installed on my computer.
3. By using the Evernote App on my phone.

I think that all three are going to be handy.

I will probably still use my folders, but Evernote provides a way of collecting items for a particular project or need, whilst also creating copies of them which is a kind of back-up for me.

I do wish that I could import all my bookmarks into Evernote from Diigo: that doesn't seem to be possible. But perhaps it is better to use both tools. I expect that I'll maintain my web bookmarks collection for when I want to record a whole website, but perhaps use the Evernote web clipping tool for when it's a particular page that I'm interested in, and that will also help me to overcome the problem of broken links that I get with my bookmark collection, because if the content is clipped then I will still be able to read it!

There might even be times when I will want to both bookmark on Diigo and clip onto Evernote, because Evernote is my own store, but Diigo is a route I use to share stuff with others. Incidentally, I don't have lots of network contacts on Diigo itself as a way of sharing, but I Tweet things that I bookmark on Diigo. I don't actually use Diigo's own feature for tweeting an item because it involves too many clicks and steps from me each time I bookmark. Instead, I've used IFFT (If this then that) to set up a rule for Diigo items to get automatically tweeted. But that is all about sharing my information and this blog post is meant to be about organising it! So many tools serve more than one purpose.

I expect that for proper research articles that I collect, I'll always want to use a reference management tool as well. Because they can create proper references for me by importing metadata and they can create lovely formatted references for me when I write anything formal, too. And they can do networking and sharing things, and "shout about my profile" things too.

Evernote isn't quite the "one ring to rule them all" for me to organise my information. But that's probably a good thing because I'd hate to rely on one tool for everything and then have it crash or want to bill me a small fortune for using it! And by using other tools as well, I get the benefit of all their other features for sharing and profile-raising.

Jenny Delasalle : 01 Mar 2013 13:00 |  Tags: Information Skills Literature Search Research Skills Researchers Tools |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

"Just About" New YouTube channel of our tips for researchers

We are creating short video clips of the best tips we give to researchers in our information skills workshops, on literature searching and disseminating your research. The series is called "Just about" as the clips are about 3 minutes long and they are each about one particular tip.

Jenny Delasalle : 08 Nov 2012 17:40 |  Tags: Information Skills Researchers Tools |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Is the LinkedIn “appearances in search” metric of interest to an academic author?

Follow-up to Who is interested in my online profile? from Library Research Support

LinkedIn recently emailed me details of who is looking at my profile. It reminds me of a previous blog post that I wrote, about who’s looking at my profile online: I often wonder if academic authors might find it valuable to track who is interested in their work.

LinkedIn told me how many profile views there have been in the last three months, how many “appearances in search” there have been, and who has been looking at my profile. I can see why it would be relevant for academic authors to see the details of others who have been looking at their profile: these might be other academics in the same field, so watching this measure is a bit like seeing who wants to listen to you at a conference. If, indeed, LinkedIn is a conference that you are attending!

I wondered what “appearances in search” meant, and found an explanation in some LinkedIn Q&As, that it is about my profile matching others’ search terms when they were not searching for my name specifically. Should academic authors be interested in this metric? I think probably not, and here is why!

I’m not 100% sure, but it seems to me that the “search” referred to must be the LinkedIn search box, on their own site. So these stats are also reflective of the amount of activity happening in LinkedIn. Since it’s not a dedicated, academic forum, our academics might not be too worried about LinkedIn activity.

If your discipline has some really active discussion groups on LinkedIn, or you wanted to generate interest in your work beyond the academic community and within the LinkedIn one (which is pretty large), then you might want to watch LinkedIn metrics more closely. You might want to see more of those search appearances being converted into profile views, as evidence that your work is relevant to that community, and as a channel to direct readers to your scholarly articles and other outputs. In order to do this, you would need to ensure that your profile describes your work accurately. But this is a good idea anyway, so I see no reason to pay attention to the number of “appearances in search”!

I blogged last time about Google Adwords but I must have had a free preview or something because I can’t find the same feature for free now. I often pop in to Google Analytics and Feedburner to see who is looking at my blog, and I regularly look at the stats for the Library’s Support for Research pages, and using these tools I can see who is looking at my site(s) and what keywords are bringing them there. These are far more rich and valuable to me than the LinkedIn stats, so I guess that they will be to academic authors, too.

But how nice of LinkedIn to send me the stats from time to time: it works for me as a reminder to update my profile!

Jenny Delasalle : 20 Aug 2012 11:27 |  Tags: Altmetrics Impact Information Skills Linkedin Researcher Profiles Researchers |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Guest post by Yvonne Budden: Metadata and Online Discoverability

Yvonne Budden is the University of Warwick's E-Repositories Manager responsible for the Publications service and WRAP, her specialisms include open access, digital repositories and copyright. She also has ten years experience creating and managing metadata.

Metadata is a key tool to aid the dissemination of research, it's not the most exciting of topics but it can make all the difference when trying to locate electronic resources. Good metadata can help elevate the ranking of an item in search tools and guide specific audiences to a resource and conversely bad metadata can mean an item is never found. This post will look at some key concepts of metadata and end with some things to consider if you're looking to publish a yourself.

Metadata is the commonly used term to describe information about other things, for example the metadata of an mp3 will include things like the track title, artist, running time, encoding used etc. Any contextual information provided about something can be considered metadata. Most researchers have a profile page with information about their educational background, department and institution affiliation, research interests, grants, publications etc., this information can be considered metadata about a researcher. Looking specifically at metadata for outputs there are three main types:

• Descriptive metadata - which describes the output for discovery and identification and can include; title, creators, abstract, keywords, journal title, DOI and many more.
• Structural metadata - indicates how compound objects inter-relate, for example how pages should be ordered in a book.
• Administrative metadata - provides information on how the output should be managed, includes date of creation, file type and other technical information. It also describes the intellectual property rights of the item, such as who owns the copyright, and any metadata required for the long term preservation of the item.

Most publishers produce metadata for items they publish and this metadata is then passed an array of services. For journal items the metadata is harvested by Web of Science, Scopus and other indexing services, as well as by Google and Library catalogues like Warwick's Encore service. Book metadata is harvested by bookseller services, libraries and data aggregators. Open Access repositories like the Warwick Research Archive (WRAP) create, harvest and disseminate metadata as widely as possible as part of their role in showcasing Warwick research. The software used for WRAP is specifically optimised to allow its metadata to be easily discovered and indexed by Google and the team undertake work to enhance and expand the metadata supplied by publishers and researchers for better rankings and discoverablity.

Metadata is what drives most of the search engines and discovery platforms for research. All of the services that create metadata, including researchers need to be aware of what the metadata says, as Emerald Publishing's guide for authors puts it:

"The online environment presents researchers with a huge amount of choice in their search for relevant articles. As an author, it is important to remember that your article is competing for attention alongside other articles and online resources." [2]

Search engines pick up on the metadata in the html headers of web pages, online resources and blog posts and use it to rank these pages in the search. Other services like the OpenURL system that drives link resolvers like SFX and Webbridge use the data to match up metadata on articles with Library holdings to help researchers access articles and e-books subscribed to by the University with little effort to the researcher. Metadata is also used as a way of telling people and machines what they have permission to do with your research once they have found it and to allow you to make an assessment about the quality of the item.

So what to researchers need to consider when creating metadata for their journal articles, blog posts, websites or journals? Below are a few things to bear in mind:

• Short titles - the more words in the title the less likely it is to be download, odd but true [2]
• Keywords - use tags and keywords that your audience will understand, but try to make sure to write out any acronyms at least once. Repeating keywords in the title and abstract (but not in the same place) will increase visibility to a search engine [2], [3]
• Consistency - when using keywords or tags try to be consistent as well as descriptive in the way you use those tags. Most blogging software and tools like Evernote will help you by presenting you a list of tags to choose from. This is especially important in blogs that have a number of contributers to keep things organised.
• Synonyms - when writing an abstract if you have used your key term once, consider using a synonym in later sentences, partially to avoid repetition and to allow users who might have chosen to use a different term to find your work.
• Identifiers - these are vital as they give people an easy way to share your work! Publishers do this for articles with Digital Object Identifers (DOIs). Open access databases create an unique permanent URL for each article (e.g. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/43230/) and some, like WRAP for Warwick researchers, create one for each member of staff (http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/view/author_id/). Most blog software generates a unique URL for each post as well.
• Be comprehensive - when people are adding metadata to objects the temptation can be to add only the 'required' fields, but everything (and anything) you put into the metadata can be used as a way for search engines to find your research so consider spending a little more time on it and giving your audience as many chances as possible to find your research.
• External services - if you are publishing your own journal consider submitting the metadata to other indexing services. Some services, like Web of Science and Scopus have tight criteria on what they index but these services are the great at disseminating journal content as they are places people use to find information. If your journal is open access, listing it in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is useful as the service now holds records from just under 8000 journals and is growing every day. If you have a working paper series listing them, or even hosting them, in an open access archive, such as SSRN, RePEc or WRAP for Warwick based series' is a quick way to benefit from wider dissemination and in WRAP's case enhanced metadata.

References:

1. Ruffilo, Nick (2011) "Five Degrees Of Metadata: Small Changes Can Mean Big Sales" Publishers Weekly Soapbox.
2. Emerald Publishing "How to... increase online readership of your article"
3. Wiley Blackwell "Optimizing Your Article for Search Engines"
4. Getting your Journal Indexed (A SPARC Guide)

Yvonne Budden : 19 Jul 2012 17:23 |  Tags: Dissemination Information Skills Open Access Publishing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Guest Post by Karina Hilder: References on–the–go…

Karina Hilder is an Academic Support Officer in the Library at the University of Warwick. This guest post describes her thoughts on using Mendeley and EndNote Web on mobile devices.

After a comparison of reference management tools Mendeley (free) and EndNote Web (free to University of Warwick researchers) I posted here a few months back, I thought I’d follow up with a few thoughts on using both on mobile devices.

Mendeley have made it quite explicit on their blog that they won’t be developing any Android apps themselves, and you only have to read a few comments to see that this has not been well received by Mendeley users. However, several third party apps have been developed to allow you access to your Mendeley records, the best of which I’ve found to be Scholarley. The set up was startlingly easy in comparison with Referey; simply download and login and Scholarley quickly syncs with your Mendeley account to bring article details and attached Pdfs onto your android device.

Mendeley have developed their own app for the iPad; Mendeley Lite. This works in a very similar way to Scholarley, with the added bonus of being able to search your references rather than just sorting and browsing them. Mendeley Lite also allows to view your favourites or recently added documents, and you can manually add references to your library.

Unfortunately, neither app brings across comments or highlights you’ve made on your papers in the desktop version of Mendeley. I can’t seem make new annotations either, but you do have the option of opening the Pdf with a different app on your device, so you could potentially access more functionality this way.

EndNote Web doesn’t have an Android or iOS (iPhone operating system) app, but of course being the web-based version of EndNote, you can access your references as usual from www.myendnoteweb.com on any device with an internet browser; everything functions as you’d normally expect apart from importing reference data which you may have downloaded from a database. The mobile version of its website also displays fine on tablets and mobiles. This allows you to search and view your records, and of course if you have a stable link in the URL field, you can follow this through to view journal articles etc. in your browser, or potentially open a Full Text Pdf in another app if preferred.

Another research tool, Zotero has an Android app called Zotero Scanner. I didn’t download this as it wasn’t free (only £1.26 mind), but it allows you to scan the barcode on books to harvest its bibliographic information from Worldcat and send it to a Zotero reference library. I’m not sure how often I’d use this, as if I’ve got the books from my library, then presumably I’ve already visited the library catalogue and could have collected the bibliographic data from there. Then again, if you happen to spot another relevant book when you’re at the shelves, scanning it in to your reference library then and there could certainly be a big time saver.

I think the potential impact of these apps will depend on the way you use your reference library. Personally, I don’t use mine to manage my reading and papers; I use it because of the work it takes out of formatting in text citations and reference lists in Word, and if I plan on doing this on the go, I’ll definitely be taking my laptop with me. I think that’s why I’ve always stuck with EndNote Web. However, if you do use Mendeley for this reason, these apps may be an excellent way of keeping your Pdf library synced across your devices for easy access at all times. That said, if you’re interested more in Pdf reader functionality, you might be better off investing in a more capable app such as Papers (£10.49 – only on iOS), allowing you to sync your library across your devices and to annotate and highlight Pdfs. Of course, if you’re willing to pay out for your software, there’s a range of other possibilities you might want to look into including Sente (Mac and iOS). I’m sticking to free software here, but if you are interested, this blog post comparing Sente and Papers might be a good place to start.

: 16 Jul 2012 09:37 |  Tags: Information Skills Reference Management Tools |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dissertation Station – Referencing on Tuesday 19th June

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/pghub/dissertation/

Dissertation station is a pilot programme of events and peer support, taking place in the Postgraduate Hub* (PG Hub) in Coventry House. Tuesday afternoon events are from 2-4pm and next week's one is on referencing and plagiarism, including an introduction to reference management software, which is very useful for researchers at all levels.

Dissertation station also features Friday afternoon events which are about students' well-being during their experience of undertaking a dissertation or research project.

Future events planned include academic writing themes and marketing your postgraduate experience to employers. We're working with other departments on campus who are the experts for these sessions, including Student Careers and Skills in particular. The format of Tuesday sessions is a question and answer one where students get to ask their questions and experts get to showcase the training and support that is available on campus.

All postgraduate students can book to attend the sessions or just show up on the day!

*The Postgraduate Hub is a new space for postgrad students on the University of Warwick campus: it opened in March this year, and my team in the Library are running the space so that we can develop the offer alongside that of the Wolfson Research Exchange. Both spaces are accessible to PhD students, but whilst the Research Exchange is for all kinds of researcher, the PG Hub is for all kinds of postgraduate so includes Warwick's large population of taught postgraduate students.

Jenny Delasalle : 13 Jun 2012 11:05 |  Tags: Information Skills Researchers |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Unpublished papers: what happens to them? How do we tell a quality paper?

Writing about web page http://www.researchgate.net/publictopics.PublicTopicRewriteHandler.html?params=%2FAcademic_Writing%2Fpost%2FHow_far_are_scientists_willing_to_go_to_publish_their_rejected_articles_or_scientific_reviews

Researchers are discussing some interesting topics on ResearchGate. I have linked to a discussion on what happens to papers that they don't manage to get published. I like the answer that they keep refining papers until they are good enough to get accepted for publication eventually. Academic authors need to be persistent and resilient, and published content needs to be of high quality!

However, there is a hierarchy of publication quality out there, and as well as improving their articles, authors can approach less selective or rigorous journals, if their aim is simply to get their work published and out in the public domain. The discussion on ResearchGate was started by someone who has established a website for "Unpublished Articles In Science" (http://www.un-a-i-s.com/). It's a new site and I didn't find any content. I am also not sure if they want any kind of article or only review articles, and they are asking for donations so I will wait and see if it takes off in any way.

This is not a new idea, to provide a "mop up" place online for academic work that would otherwise not be discoverable. Some institutional repositories were set up as places to make all kinds of research outputs available, including unpublished work. I guess that some authors might just get frustrated enough that their work cannot be published in any other way and put their article(s) somewhere like that, but I wonder what the value is in doing this? Perhaps some really important scholarly works are being missed by the world, but perhaps some works are just not of high enough quality and so should not be publicly available: they might even be misleading.

Surely the peer review and editorial processes of journals exist for a reason? If the work is not of high enough quality to be published, then should it really be in the public domain? Would it not damage an author's career, to have lesser quality work attributed to him/her in such a public way? It is possible that a particular piece of research is just too different for there to be an appropriate journal or publishing outlet, even though it is of high quality and importance. The "differentness" of the output could be that it is in an unusual format or that the subject is highly unusual, and the researcher might be glad of a place that simply makes the work publicly available.

Institutional repositories which accept any kind of output, whether published or not, rely on their academics' judgement about what is a good output. In a way, there is a quality filter of some sort because the author must be employed by the institution, so there is some likelihood that s/he will be able to select what should and should not be in the public domain and associated with his/her name. Some institutions even introduce internal peer review in some way, for unpublished outputs.

At the same time, publishers are introducing new journal titles which appear a little less selective. I am thinking of their author-pays open access (OA) titles, since authors' letters of rejection from their journal of choice sometimes include a suggestion that the article could now be submitted to the publisher's open access journal. The concept of the author paying a publication fee has always been an argument against the open access model of publication, because it interferes with the quality filters in the existing reader-pays model. Of course, the article could still be rejected from the OA journal and there is no reason why peer review could not operate just as rigorously in OA journals as in any other journals.

New, online journals or article collections are not bound by the same format and issue restrictions as traditional journals, and that does allow them to accept more "different" content. The selectiveness or otherwise of an online journal need not be dictated by the amount of print space and paper, but it can use selective criteria based on quality alone. That sounds like a "good thing"!

OA journals can still be of very high quality, as evidenced by the PLoS journals' high impact factor. (I have blogged about these kinds of publication before, and of course I know that impact factors are not infallible measures of quality.) PLoS ONE is the largest, most inclusive journal from PLoS and it has some really interesting features and filters, to enable people to discover high quality research outputs.

With online journals and collections of academic outputs, as with all online materials, the reader needs to be more aware than ever of the features that indicate the quality of the work s/he is reading. Hopefully, the reader will read widely and so be aware of the field, when reading academic content, but beyond the readers' own expertise and academic insight, websites and online journals have features to help readers to assess quality.

Here is a little list of clues on academic quality, including traditional as well as new online features:

1. place of publication: eg journal title, or special collection within a wider collection like PLoS ONE
   
2. information about the authors: institution employed at, membership of organisations, etc
   
3. information about who funded the work - they value it, but you might also want to ask why.
   
4. when the work was published: this might be recent or it might be before a defining discovery altered academic understanding, so dates are important clues!
   
5. whose work is referenced and acknowledged, and therefore this work builds upon
6. news & media coverage
7. reviews or comments by other readers, either on the collection site or on readers' blogs.
   
8. ratings/scores by other readers
   
9. tweets about the article (or other social network discussions)
   
10. number of "likes" or bookmarks by other readers
11. number of views or downloads of an article
12. citations of the article by others (NB citation sources might matter, i.e. who is citing the work)
    

Publishers can help readers to access these clues, and providing trackback URLs and ways for readers to bookmark articles in their tool of choice, in a way that the publisher can monitor and publicise are important contributions that a publisher can make. And bullet points 7 onwards in my list are numerical scores, and as such should be taken in context. What is a high score for an article in one discipline might seem low in another discipline: publishers could also provide that context, if they want to help readers to appreciate the quality of the work that they are publishing.

Sites like the UNAIS, institutional repositories and even authors' own sites need to be as good as publishers at providing clues as to quality, if not better, since their quality filters are less well known and understood. And readers do need to be aware.

Jenny Delasalle : 08 Jun 2012 09:00 |  Tags: Getting Published Information Skills Publishers Quality Researcher Profiles Researchers Social Networking |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Informed Researcher: Vitae's new resource for researchers

Last week Vitae continued its mission of supporting the development of researchers by publishing The Informed Researcher. This booklet maps the Researcher Development Framework onto a set of practical steps that all researchers can take to ensure that they are making the most of the information they gather, analyse, evaluate and disseminate. Devised by researchers and librarians expert in information literacy, it starts with the importance of research questions and ends with an examination of publishing models and measuring impact. Considering that the authors have written it so that it is relevant to researchers across disciplines, it’s very detailed, and prompts you to audit your own information skills.

Sian Prosser : 30 Apr 2012 18:32 |  Tags: Information Skills Researchers |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A useful blog: New Media for Researchers

New Media for Researchers is a blog provided by Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. It’s aimed at researchers in Business Studies, but is full of links and resources on reference management and finding information that will be useful to people working across a range of disciplines. I particularly like the new series of posts entitled ‘Stuff librarians know (that you should know too)’’.

Sian Prosser : 27 Apr 2012 19:21 |  Tags: Finding Resources Information Skills Reference Management Researchers |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem