Thursday 28 April 2016

Using Google™ to track and improve your research impact • Research to Action

Using Google™ to track and improve your research impact

By 28 August 2013
If you are a researcher, you will undoubtedly be familiar with
Google’s simple search box. Behind its simplicity, Google also offers
you a range of opportunities to report on and track the impact you and
your work are having. For instance, Google will help you ascertain: how
visible your research is online; how often your work is cited and
determine whether your findings are being reported in the news, on blogs
or discussion boards?


This guide, written by Cheryl Brown and Siobhan Duvigneau, provides a
number of simple ways to track and trace your research on the web.


Title: Using Google™ to track and improve your research impact Author: Cheryl Brown and Siobhan Duvigneau Year: 2013

Using Google™ to track and improve your research impact • Research to Action

How to use social media to further your scientific career and build your personal research profile

 Source:http://news.ximbio.com/how-to-use-social-media-to-further-your-scientific-career-and-build-your-personal-research-profile

How to use social media to further your scientific career and build your personal research profile

07 April 2016
Social
media is having a growing impact on scientific research. Scientists are
using social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and ResearchGate to
keep track of the latest publications in their field, seek advice, start
collaborations, find new research tools and troubleshoot their
experiments, to name just a few. To have a strong and lasting impact on
the scientific community, modern researchers need to utilise the power
of social media to share their expertise, research tools and
experiences. In this week’s blog, we explore how you can get started
with building your online scientific profile using social media.



Ximbio_-_How_to_build_an_online_scientific_profile_using_social_media_blog_670px.jpg


The web has revolutionised how people share and find information.
However, the growing impact of social media over the last few years has
been especially interesting, with sites such as Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn becoming truly embedded within Western culture (for example,
Facebook has over a billion registered users!).


The social web provides researchers with new opportunities to connect with likeminded peers, find and share new information and research tools,
and even get credit for their research through platforms such as
Altmetrics. This site describes almetrics as “metrics and qualitative
data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics
[that] can include… peer reviews on Faculty of 1000, citations on
Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs,
mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like
Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter.”


As such, scientists can now leverage social media to build their
research profiles in the same way that they have traditionally used
speaking slots and posters at conferences, as well as the publication of
peer-reviewed papers. The key difference is speed and frequency. While
most researchers publish every few months (or years), social media
allows researchers to continually contribute to their field and be part
of an ongoing discussion. If we take the extended definition of social
media and include blogging and other publishing tools, then researchers
can also utilise the medium to share, discuss and encourage real-time
feedback on their data, experiences and protocols.


Given these opportunities, it is unsurprising that many scientists
are starting to adopt social media as a tool for engaging in scientific
discussion and building their research profile. Other benefits of
creating a strong online personal brand include being able to easily:


  • Connect with peers, students and suppliers and start new collaborations
  • Get involved in discussions during events
  • Establish your reputation as an expert and a thought leader
  • Influence and mentor a potentially global audience
  • Keep up-to-date with relevant science news



9 steps to building your online reputation

Most of the social media platforms are free to use and make it easy
to start building an online presence right away. Here are nine things
you can do today to start building your online research profile:


  1. Create a professional profile
    (Bio/CV/list of research interests/researcher ID/photo) and upload to
    relevant sites such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate
  2. Find connections (peers, colleagues etc.) and link with them on social media platforms 
  3. Find relevant groups to join and seek opportunities to mentor online
  4. Share your reagents via online marketplaces
  5. Share your protocols online
  6. Share reviews of scientific reagents
    and tools, to help others make more informed decisions on which reagents
    to use for their experiments
  7. Optimise your research news stream to show only relevant news
  8. Keep track of your online stats (e.g. mentions)
  9. Upload relevant science presentations
    e.g. to SlideShare and share them with the community via sites such as
    Twitter, LinkedIn, ResearchGate etc.



Online portals for scientific networking

There are many different social media platforms that you could use
for your scientific network, but each is currently being used by
researchers in subtly different ways. To explore these trends in more
detail, Nature conducted a survey in 2014 to find out which platforms scientists used and how they used them. The results are summarised in the table below:


Ximbio_-_Table_of_social_media_channels_for_use_in_science.png


In summary, while Facebook isn’t used much professionally by
scientists at the current time, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and LinkedIn
are used to publish profiles and Mendeley and Twitter are used to
communicate news. Therefore, we recommend reviewing these channels first
when starting to build your online research profile.





Other ways to use the internet to enhance your research impact and build your scientific profile

Creating a strong online profile is just one of the ways you can use the internet to boost the impact of your work on science and society.
To learn about other online tools that facilitate the effective sharing
of reagents, protocols, reviews, experiences and data, download our new
ebook today.



DOWNLOAD EBOOK NOW


How to use social media to further your scientific career and build your personal research profile

Thursday 21 April 2016

SSRN Top Downloads For AARN: Anthropology of Education (Cross-Cultural) (Topic)



Rank

Downloads

Paper Title


1



16




A Comprehensive Comparison of Educational Growth within Four Different Developing Countries between 1990 and 2012













Masoud Shakiba,






Nader Ale Ebrahim,






Mahmoud Danaee,






Kaveh Bakhtiyari and






Elankovan Sundararajan




































































National University of Malaysia, University of
Malaya (UM) - Research Support Unit, Centre for Research Services,
Institute of Research Management and Monitoring (IPPP)University of
Malaya (UM) - Department of Engineering Design and Manufacture,
University Malaya, University of Duisburg-Essen and Center for Software
Technology and Management, Faculty of Information Science and
Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia



Date posted to database: 6 Apr 2016


Last Revised: 6 Apr 2016


SSRN Top Downloads

Monday 18 April 2016

Impact of Social Sciences – Writing for Impact: How can we write about our research in a way that leads to meaningful change?

 Source: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/04/18/writing-for-impact-how-can-we-write-about-our-research-in-a-way-that-leads-to-meaningful-change/

Writing for Impact: How can we write about our research in a way that leads to meaningful change?

thinking writingAcademic
work may have impact in a variety of ways, depending on purpose,
audience and field, but this is most likely to happen when your work
resonates in meaningful ways with people.
Ninna Meier encourages
a more systematic investigation of the role of writing in achieving
impact. Impact through writing means getting your readers to understand
and remember your message and leave the reading experience changed. The
challenge is to make what you write resonate with an audience’s
reservoir of experiential knowledge. If the words do not connect to
anything tangible, interest can be quickly lost.



I am currently finishing a three-year impact study and I have so many
things I want to share from this and other projects: in short, I am an
impact geek. But whenever I started writing this text, I stopped; I
wasn’t satisfied with what I wrote, it never came out right, and I
didn’t know quite why. Why is writing about impact hard, while researching it or talking about it
comes much more natural to me? Could it be something in the nature of
the concept or phenomenon itself? Or is it just me? Once I start
reflecting on the impact of my work, my usual academic language does not
suffice. Sure, I can write the academic paper presenting the
theoretical framework, the method and data analysis and share the
results, but the really interesting questions of impact escapes this
kind of writing to some degree. And I think writing as a way of impacting holds some of the answers.


I first started thinking about this back when I was ‘writing up’ the
results of my PhD and I had what I then thought of as surplus material
in the lots and lots of field notes and my interview material from the
study of clinical managers in different types of bed units. ‘My’
managers were often not involved in the clinical work with patients, but
they were managers of people, who diagnosed, treated, cared for and
comforted very sick people. And although the relational nature of
clinical managerial work made it in to the PhD as an important result, I
was never completely happy with the way I wrote about it. A crucial
link was not unfolded sufficiently explaining the potential effects of
how a certain local context could impact work and vice versa. In short,
what impact a certain place and practice had on the work and people who
performed it and how I managed to convey this in order to impact
research and practice.


One of my units was a stroke unit and I was dissatisfied with the way
I wrote about the connections between this unit as a place, the type of
patients that were there, the rehabilitation and care they needed, the
way work was organized and politically governed, and the kind of
clinical managerial work that was practiced there. The texts always
seemed devoid of the life, the physical bodies, the complexity and pace
of work, the urgency felt when an alarm rang, or the genuine welcoming atmosphere the place had.


I started experimenting with how to write as to include the messy
world of context, an advice one of my committee members gave me at my
defence. I wrote to let readers experience the impact of being there,
detailed sensory laden accounts of the sights, smells, noises and
impressions I had experienced. But these kinds of text were not entirely
right either. What is it, then? In my current project, I use drawings, I
experiment with composite characters, and I build stories in which the
small, almost unnoticeable, yet immensely important details can be
included, because I can show them as possible experiences: ‘this is how it could happen’, as examples of experiential knowledge for the reader to relate to.


Place_des_Abbesse_(the_plaque_with_the_je_t'aime=te_iubesc_in_311_laguages)The Wall of Love in Paris by Britchi Mirela (CC BY-SA, Wikimedia)
But I still struggle, even with writing this text. It is as if the
words themselves, for writing about this in an academic text, are not
there; as if the vocabulary belongs to real life and seemingly small
lived experiences and not academia. It is the language of particulars,
of everyday life with patients and colleagues, where impact might mean
you help someone regain the ability to speak or shower. And then again;
although these are important aspects, they cannot stand alone in our
world: for academic work to have impact, we usually aim to reach people beyond the
particular setting and share the results much more broadly. Impact
through writing means getting your readers to understand and remember
your message and leave the reading experience changed. Real impact,
the kind we academics dream about, means that other people take your
work/message/results and change something because of this.


And one of the main points arising from my work is that this is most
likely to happen when your work resonates in meaningful ways with
people. This leaves the challenge of making what you write
resonate with them through how it connects to their reservoir of
experiential knowledge (which you cannot know in advance, only offer the
possibilities for). As Wikan (2012)
points out, this kind of writing is connected to your methods and the
things you’ve seen, learned and engaged in during your research. For me,
being there in person is an indispensable part of the process and it is
tied to how you write and which possible connections you offer
your reader to latch on and relate their own experience to. Writing
that is too ‘far’ from life makes it difficult for me to ‘see’ what this
means in practice. Papers can be abstract, philosophical or theoretical
in nature, and remain ‘attached’ to the concept or phenomenon they are
about. But if the words do not connect to anything I can picture and
understand, I quickly lose interest and have a hard time remembering the
paper.


I am not done thinking about and writing about impact in practice,
but it all comes down to this important part of the process: what
happens after the reader puts down the paper or leaves the
auditorium? Does she use your work in her own research? Does he tell his
colleagues about it over lunch or share it on social media? Will it
become part of the theoretical foundation on which future impact studies
build? Our work may have impact in a variety of ways, depending on
purpose, audience and field, but I would like to encourage a more
systematic investigation of and attention to the role of writing in
achieving this!


Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the
position of the LSE Impact blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.



About the Author


Ninna Meier is a postdoctoral fellow at Department
of organization, at Copenhagen Business School. She has researched
organization and management practices in health care work since 2009,
currently exploring what it takes to achieve coherency in patient
pathways. How to impact in practice, specifically the role of writing in
this, is one of her main interests

Sunday 10 April 2016

Upskill Programme: Research Tools: Enhancing Visibility And Impact Of The Research



 





Dear All Postgraduate Candidates,

Greetings
from Institute of Graduate Studies!

We
are pleased to announce that we are organizing a workshop for the month of
April 2016. Details of the workshop are as follows:


Title

:

Research Tools: Enhancing Visibility And Impact Of The
Research

Speaker

:

Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim

Date

:

15 April 2016 (Friday)

Time

:

9.00 am – 12.00 pm

Venue

:

Computer Lab 2, Level 4, Institute of Graduate Studies

Target of Participants

:

Any UM postgraduate candidate

Max. No. Participants

:

40


Introduction:
Research
Tools
” can be defined as vehicles that broadly facilitate research and
related activities. Scientific tools enable researchers to collect, organize,
analyze, visualize and publicized research  outputs. Dr. Nader has
collected over 700 tools that enable students to follow the correct path in
research and to ultimately produce high-quality research outputs with more
accuracy and efficiency. It is assembled as an interactive Web-based mind map,
titled “Research
Tools
”, which is updated periodically.
Research
Tools
” consists of a hierarchical set of nodes. It has four main nodes: (1)
Searching the literature, (2) Writing a paper, (3) Targeting suitable journals, and
(4) Enhancing visibility and impact
of the research
. Several free tools can be found in the child nodes. In
this workshop some tools as examples from the part 4 (Enhancing visibility and impact of the
research
) will be described. The e-skills learned from the workshop
are useful across various research
disciplines and research institutions.

REMINDER
·        
Please make sure that
you are available to attend the workshop from  9.00 am to 12.00 pm before
registering for the  workshop.
·        
All selected
participants are STRONGLY advised to
be punctual and fully committed to the workshop participation.
·        
Those who registered
and are selected for the workshop but are absent on the day of the workshop
without giving any prior notice to the organizer will be blacklisted from
similar workshop in the future.
·        
Late
comers/participants will not be allow to enter the workshop to avoid disruption
to the workshop learning and are advise to come early to sign the attendance.
Your cooperation on the above matters is greatly
appreciated.


INVITATION TO REGISTER

Application is now open from 11
April 2016
 – 13 April 2016 or until the maximum capacity is
reached, whichever comes first.

Interested participants, please submit
your particulars by clicking the following link: REGISTER
HERE
 .

Thank you.

STUDENT
RESEARCH TRAINING UNIT

INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF MALAYA

TEL : 
03-79676935

FAX : 03-79674606

email: 
ips_upskill@um.edu.my


=====================================================

Deputy Dean

Institute of Graduate Studies

University of Malaya

50603 Kuala Lumpur MALAYSIA



http://www.um.edu.my/

http://www.ips.um.edu.my/




Upskill Programme: Research Tools: Enhancing Visibility And Impact Of The Research