Impact factor, altmetrics, and all that jazz

This week we will be running a support session on impact factors, altmetrics and related topics. It is likely you will hear these terms used in relation to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and on other occasions when the impact and influence of your research is assessed. If you would like to find out more about these concepts and measures (and all have their supporters and critics), come along to the library at 9am on Tuesday 28th April. Later this week, we will publish a fuller outline here. In the meantime, here is a presentation we gave to the PostGraduate Research Supervisor's Forum a few months ago along similar lines.

Measuring Research Impact from YSJ_ILS

Using Pocket for Keeping Track of your Reading

Keeping track of what you'd like to read can be a full time job (if you're interested in this as a career path, come talk to us in ILS!) and it's something we're passionate about. After looking through your email, scrolling through Twitter and spending a leisurely 10 minutes on Facebook, you may well have seen several articles you'd be interested in reading further. After this digital feast, however, you  likely won't have the time or energy to explore each thing in-depth. There are a variety of tools available to keep track of what you'd like to read from all their various sources and in all their various formats (our support session on it introduces a number of useful and fun ones). Another one we haven't mentioned yet is Pocket.

As a part of their 10 Days of Twitter training program, our friends of TEL introduced me (Leah) to Pocket: a bookmarklet you can install in your browser which allows you to save any webpage immediately with a click of a button. Using Pocket, you might, for example, find and save a tweet or a journal article in one browser while at your desk, save it to your 'pocket' and read it later on your phone while riding the bus. Day 9 of TEL's Twitter program explains it well, have a look!

CORE: Researching in Institutional Repositories

You will be noticing a lot of buzz around Open Access research this year and next, including the introduction of RaY, YSJ's research repository. RaY hosts your research outputs and makes them available open access in-line with publisher requirements.

RaY is not an isolated research repository. UK institutions who want to comply with funder mandates on open access and the new HEFCE requirements for REF will also be implementing and filling their respositories. You may notice your Google searches are pulling up more and more results from repositories but if you'd like to limit your searches to a database which searches solely in research repositories, try out CORE, a freely available database which searches hundreds of research repositories worldwide. Those of you whose research involves policy makers, schools, healthcare workers or really anyone who works outside of academia will find tools like CORE to be very useful, as it can provide access to research to those who usually don't have subscriptions.

If you're interested in hearing more about it, we'll be offering an introduction to RaY on Thursday 7 May at 9:00AM in DG104 and an introduction to Open Access on Wednesday April 22 at 9:00AM on the ground floor of Fountains. Please also keep an eye out for a researcher's goody bag from ILS with information on RaY, which will be arriving shortly.