Friday 2 September 2016

Five ways to improve your research impact

Source: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/services/research/4-ways-improve-research-impact.aspx

Five ways to improve your research impact

1. Publish strategically

  • Choose the right journal
    Publishing in high quality
    journals which are read by others within your discipline is the most
    well established and important method of sharing your findings. You will
    target different journals at different stages of your career. To find
    out if a journal is relevant, peer reviewed and also whether/where it is
    abstracted and indexed,check Ulrich’s web, an online directory of
    periodicals, purchased by the university and available via FindIt@Bham.
  • Use the right keywords
    If you’re looking for scholarly
    information, on the web, or in a citation database, keywords tend to be
    the retrieval tool of choice.Think about the title of your paper and the
    words you use in your abstract.Does it contain the ‘agreed terminology’
    of your research area; will it be found by other researchers?
  • Use the right address
    Publication address
    standardisation will ensure that your work is correctly attributed to
    University of Birmingham. Check the publisher guidelines before
    submission, but include details on department,school, college and
    university address.
  • Use ORCID
    This
    non-profit organisation provides researchers with a unique identifier
    and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to
    these identifiers. ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across
    disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and it cooperates
    with other identifier systems. UoB now has institutional membership to
    ORCID.

2. Monitor and verify bibliometrics

  • Understand citation analysis
    University of Birmingham has access to two important subscription databases which provide tools to analyse journal and author ‘bibliometrics’. These are Web of Knowledge (WoK) and Scopus.Both are available via FindIt@Bham.
  • Know your Subject Advisor
    Each school within the
    University has been assigned a librarian to support researchers at every
    stage of their career and at every step of the research process. This
    includes advice on bibliographic management using packages such as
    Endnote and Reference Manager, and also advice on how to use the
    citation tools mentioned above. Identify your Subject Advisor

3. Be open to new publishing models

  • Begin by making sure your profile on PURE is up to datePURE
    is an institutional database which aims to bring together all research
    information from the University of Birmingham in one place. With
    researchers, their publications and projects, esteem and impact all
    gathered together in PURE, it provides an accurate single source of
    information on the research activitiy and capability of the University.
    PURE supports the creation of CVs which will automatically update when
    you enter new publications, activities etc.
  • Embrace Open Access - put your work online
    Make use of UBIRA UoBs
    institutional repository and self-archive as much of your work as
    possible, enabling the widest possible exposure of your work.  You can
    check the 'Funders and Authors compliance tool' FACT to
    find out what you are premitted to do. Most publishing policies will
    allow you to archive a version of your work in a repository,usually the
    author accepted manuscript/postprint, so do keep these. Make sure as
    much as possible of the research you have done in the past is available
    online too. This will improve its discoverability and will ensure your
    work is found, read and ultimately cited. A number of studies suggest that this results in an increase in citations ranging from 20% to 500%.
  • Go to the Open Access pages for more information on Open Access publishing models, UBIRA and Pure.

4. Be social

  • Use social media
    Disseminate your thoughts and findings
    using a blog and tag (keyword) your posts appropriately to garner
    maximum hits on search engines. Use hashtags effectively to help people
    find your tweets and broaden your network of followers. Kudos is one useful tool for describing your research in lay terminology, disseminating it and seeing how many mentions you generate.
  • Use academic and professional social networks
    Register with services such as Academia.edu and LinkedIn and follow other people in your field. They will also begin to follow you.
  • Update the web
    Periodically check that your personal webpages, including your publications lists, are current.
  • Remember to raise your profile retrospectively
    If you are just beginning to make use of social media, don’t forget to mention work you have already done.
  • Engage in conversation
    Don't be tempted to simply promote your work; also take part in debate with your followers.

5. Manage your research data

  • Consider your file naming conventionsIdeally filenames
    should allow you to identify the content of the file without opening it.
    Think about using version information, and the ordering of the elements
    within a filename, e.g. YYYMMDD allows chronological ordering of the
    files.
  • Back up your data
    Make multiple copies. Keep copies in
    different places, and automate the process where possible. This will
    save time and mitigate against data loss due to accident or incident.
  • Complete a Data Management Plan (DMP)
    This will help you
    to consolidate your requirements and plan processes for protecting the
    data and preserving the data for future use. You may also be required to
    do this by your research funder.
  • Describe your data using metadata
    Adding details of your
    data to PURE will enable the metadata to be generated automatically and
    harvested by search engines. Effective metadata will help other users to
    find your data, and can result in increased use of your data, and
    citation of your work, increasing your research impact.
  • Compile documentation to support users of your data
    This
    will ensure that your data is given appropriate context inclusing who
    created it, when and why, description of the item, methodology and
    methods, units of measurement, definitions of jargon, acronyms and code
    and references to related data. All of this will enhance the usability
    of your data and increase its impact.
  • Share your data
    Storing your data in a repository and
    linking it to your research outputs will allow other researchers to
    verify the work you have done, enable them to build on your work and
    enhance your academic reputation.
Library Services offers an introductory online course in Research Data Management



Five ways to improve your research impact

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