Research News

Periodicals Index Online – Trial Access until

ISS Research Support — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:01:04 +0000

We have on campus access to Periodicals Index Online until 15 June.

Periodicals Index Online Indexes over 20 million articles published in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Journals are indexed from their first volume (in some cases published over 300 years ago) up to 1995 or the year they ceased publication.

Let us know what you think about it. Contact Ian Glen (Arts & Humanites Subject Librarian)

Open Access may get another push from the Research Councils

ISS Research Support — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:38:07 +0000

Some academics are still sometimes concerned that publishing in an Open Access journal may not have the same kudos as a subscription journal with a high impact factor. But now, following Willets’ speech to the publishers last week, there is speculation that the Research Councils will consider making open access part of the ”excellence criteria for qualifying articles” for REF post-2014. (See article in THES)

Of course, following the “Gold Route” (i.e. author pays model), we can see that often these open access journals can have high impact factors and the fact that they are freely available may increase the number of citations to articles. Journal Impact Factors are, after all, based upon the number of citations to articles published by a journal. The BiomedCentral stable of journals are all building good reputations and impact factors.

And, if authors follow the “Green Route” (self-archiving in an institutional or subject repository), they can publish in a subscription journal but still make their research outputs publicly available so long as they do so within the terms set by the publisher – or negotiated between the author and publisher.

Tips for using Scopus: compare journals in your field

ISS Research Support — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:56:06 +0000

We ran a fully-booked session on “Getting Published” for Postgraduates this week in the library. One of the topics we looked at was finding the journals in your subject that have the biggest impact factor. The “Impact Factor” of a journal is a metric developed and owned by Thomson Reuters. Swansea University staff and students can use their Journal Citation Reports database for Social Sciences or Science to find the “Impact Factor” and other rankings for journals.

Scopus has its own alternative metric for assessing journal impact and ranking called the SJR (Scimago Journal Rank). This can be queried on the Scimago website (freely available) or from within the Scopus database. Some journals are ranked using this metric that do not appear on the Journal Citation Reports, in particular more recent journals as JCR requires three years of citation data before a journal can be ranked.

From within Scopus, click “Analytics” on the blue menu bar.

Search for a journal e.g. “Welsh History Review”. You can then drag and drop the journal title into the right-hand area to view line charts or tables for that journal. Search for more journals (e.g. “English Historical Review”) and add them to compare citation patterns. Use the slider tool below the chart to restrict to more recent years. Citation patterns are not usually comparable across subject areas – there is a drop-down list of subject areas below the search box if you wish to restrict the journals you are viewing.

To view all journals within a subject area by ranking, the Scimago website has a handy Journal Rankings facility.

Willetts asks Jimmy Wales to advise on development of UK “Gateway to Research” portal.

ISS Research Support — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:41:01 +0000

David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers’ Association yesterday, set out the Coalition’s commitment to free Open Access to publicly funded UK research outputs. He acknowledged the role of publishers in scholarly communication and said that he wanted to work with them. Not only is there a need for public access to publicly funded research, he said, but there is also a need to make it more discoverable and to assist “networking between researchers and SMEs”. To this end, he said, Research Councils in the UK “are now investing £2 million in the development of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’ portal. Jimmy Wales has been asked to advise on the creation of this portal, which it is intended ”will enable users to establish who has received funding and for what research [and] provide direct links to actual research outputs such as data sets and publications”.

Read Willetts’ article in the Guardian

OA + Blog + Twitter = more downloads of scholarly articles??

ISS Research Support — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:51:47 +0000

Melissa Terras (UCL) has been monitoring downloads of her articles from the institutional repository at UCL since she started writing about them on her blog and “tweeting the papers for download”. Did it have an impact? Read her blog.

Tips for using Scopus: finding the most significant articles on a topic

ISS Research Support — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:40:41 +0000

Swansea University library has a subscription to the SCOPUS database, a vast multidisciplinary index of academic materials. The database is straightforward to use for a search and will hopefully retrieve a substantial set of results for your topic. However, if you wish to identify which are the most influential articles for your topic, you can use the “Sort By” drop-down box to re-order your results and display the most-cited articles first:

When you have selected to view details of a particular article in SCOPUS, you can then click through to see details of all the articles that cite it:

There is then a further option to analyze this citation data:

You can then view the citation patterns according to these criteria:

Year: see the pattern of citations over time
Source: see which journal titles it was cited in
Author: see which authors cited the article the most
Affiliation name: see which institutions cited the article the most
Country
Document Type e.g. article, conference paper etc.
Subject area

You can also export the citation data as a .csv file (suitable for use in Excel): the export file will only contain the data for the specific criteria you are viewing (e.g. Year).

For more information, see our Guide to Scopus for Researchers (PDF) and a general guide to using Scopus (PDF).

The cost of communicating scholarly research: is Open Access the answer?

ISS Research Support — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:52:03 +0000

This is an ongoing debate which is getting a lot of attention right now. We have already seen articles about the “Academic Spring” in the Guardian and now the same newspaper has published an article in which it says that Harvard University “ wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls”.

The National Institute for Health (USA) Public Access Policy requires that all research funded by them must be made publicly available “no later than 12 months after the official date of publication”. In the UK, the Research Councils are “committed to the guiding principles that publicly funded research must be made available to the public and remain accessible for future generations” and recently produced for consultation a revised draft of their OA policy which goes much further than the original. The Medical Research Council claim to be “champions of open access publishing”.

So how does Open Access work? Will it be the author-pays-for-publication model or self-archiving in institutional of subject-based open access repositories? If we move towards OA, what is the future for scholarly communication in general?

If you want to know more about Open Access in the UK, the JISC have a useful web page, and the RIN (Research Information Network) have published a report (Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications) which sets the OA debate in the context of shcolarly journal publishing.

New website for the REF

ISS Research Support — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:06:01 +0000

The new website for the REF can be found at http://www.ref.ac.uk/. It gives detail about the timetable, requirements etc. for the 2014 research assessment exercise.

The cost of access to published research

ISS Research Support — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:28:54 +0000

As the cost of subscriptions to scholarly journals continue to increase, some researchers have begun to take a stand against some of the major publishers. A recent article in The Guardian tells the story.

REF 2014 – Panel criteria and working methods – Jan 2012

ISS Research Support — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:57:35 +0000

Available from the HEFCE website, this document sets out the assessment criteria and working methods of the main and sub-panels for the 2014 Research.

Revisions have been made in the light of the consultation exercise (‘Consultation on draft panel criteria and working methods’ ). Amendments to the guidelines that were published in ‘Assessment framework and guidance on submissions‘ (REF 02.2011) are set out in Part 1, paragraphs 43, 44 and 64-91 and supersede the relevant paragraphs of REF 02.2011.

Full details…