Monthly Archives: October 2016

Roundup of “Metrics: what they are and how to use them”

Chris and I delivered a session entitled “Metrics: what they are and how to use them” today as part of the Research Career Development Programme at the OU. It was really enjoyable and we got some great engagement from the audience.

You can access our script/notes for the session here:

Metrics-what they are and how to use them-script-October 2016

The main takeaways from the session were:

  • Different databases can give different metric scores (i.e. a citation count for an article in Web of Science may not be the same as in Google Scholar)
  • Different databases provide different metrics
  • Metrics can be flawed and misleading, you need to understand how they work to engage with them fully
  • Curate your author profiles (e.g. in Scopus, ORCID, ResearchGate etc.) to ensure metrics about you are more accurate
  • Different author profile system offer different functionality, depending on their aims
  • It is not clear how metrics will be used in the next REF yet

When asked what they thought about metrics at the beginning of the session, there were attendees who commented on the fact there are numerous metrics out there (which can be confusing!), that metrics appear to be simple (but are not really), that metrics need to be understood and interpreted to make them useful and that metrics can help with literature searches.

When asked what they thought about metrics again at the end of the session, comments focused on the fact that metrics show what research is popular but not what is high quality. It was also asked whether the REF needed its own metric rather than relying on existing metrics.

Thanks to everyone who attended and please be aware that we are running the session again on Wednesday December 7th from 2-3.30pm. To book a place, please email library-training@open.ac.uk

Research students – welcome and reference management training

We just wanted to say a huge welcome to new research students who are starting at the OU. Good luck with your studies and we hope you have a great time!

If you’re not already familiar with them, learning reference management software such as Mendeley or EndNote as a research student can be really useful. Often students say they wish they had learned these tools earlier in order to save time during their research.

So, we thought we’d take the opportunity to let you know about some training on reference management tools we are running, as part of the OU’s Doctoral Training programme. We have a number of introductory sessions on Mendeley and EndNote Basic:

  • Tuesday 11th October, 2-3.30pm – Introduction to EndNote Basic – Wilson C, Cedar Room
  • Tuesday 18th October, 2-3.30pm – Introduction to Mendeley – Wilson C, Cedar Room
  • Tuesday 1st November, 2-3.30pm – Introduction to EndNote Basic – Wilson C, Cedar Room
  • Tuesday 8th November, 2-3.30pm – Introduction to Mendeley – Wilson C, Birch and Chestnut Rooms

These sessions aim to get you up and running with Mendeley or EndNote Basic and cover getting set up, importing references, managing references, adding citations and bibliographies to Microsoft Word documents.

To book yourself a place, please email library-training@open.ac.uk.

Additionally, you might want to take a look at some of the online help that is offered in relation to these tools, such as the Mendeley Help Guides, the EndNote Online Quick Reference Guide and the Using EndNote Basic/Online YouTube playlist.

Open Access Week 2016

The 9th Global Open Access Week is held between October 24th to 30th, the theme this year is “Open in Action”. Library Services is marking Open Access Week with 3 events, all sessions are open to all.

OpenAccessWeek_logo

 

Open Research Data & Open Research Data Online (ORDO)

Wendy Mears (Research Support Librarian) will be introducing the new research data store that enables you to publish completed research data and get a permanent, citable DOI for your work. Based on the established Figshare platform, ORDO makes it easy to link to supporting data from other publications, and provides an accessible shop window on University research. ORDO can also be used for live data storage by individual users or collaborative project groups.

Further Information: Tuesday 25th October, 10-11am Library Presentation Room
Booking Information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-research-data-and-open-research-data-online-ordo-tickets-28332219431

Getting to Grips with Open Access Publishing

Chris Biggs (Research Support Librarian) will explore Open Access Publishing. We will cover both the Gold and Green routes to Open Access, the benefits of Open Access and the different Open Access Policies researchers now operate under.

Further Information: Wednesday 26th October, 10-11am Library Presentation Room
Booking Information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/getting-to-grips-with-open-access-publishing-tickets-28332426049

Claiming your research publications: ORCIDs at the OU

Chris Biggs (Research Support Librarian) will give an introduction to Open Researcher & Contributor IDs (ORCIDs), the non-proprietary identifier for researchers that has become the de-facto standard in the community. We will explore why they are a good idea and the time saving benefits for researchers. Please bring along a mobile device – there will be time to sign up for ORCIDs, add items to your ORCID record and configure it to auto-populate with new publications.

Further Information: Friday 28th October, 10-11am Library Presentation Room
Booking Information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/claiming-your-research-publications-orcids-at-the-ou-tickets-28332611604

Social Media, Open Access and the Institutional Repository

The impact of engaging with social media in conjunction with Open Access papers in a repository is not new and was perhaps first illustrated by Melissa Terras back in 2012 in her blog post Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict where she writes:

The papers that were tweeted and blogged had at least more than 11 times the number of downloads than their sibling paper which was left to its own devices in the institutional repository. QED, my friends. QED.”

When I review the top downloads of publications in ORO every month I see papers that have received more downloads than usual and I can attempt to see why that might be. Some months we can see how the presence of research outputs in MOOCs or OU modules increases the number of downloads of research publications.  But this month there are 2 striking examples of how social media impacts the dissemination of research publications.

The top 50 downloads from August are listed below:

2016-08-monthly_downloads_ORO_Upload

The first output that interested me was at Number 6: Ferguson, Rebecca; Coughlan, Tim and Herodotou, Christothea (2016). MOOCS: What The Open University research tells us. Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes.  This received 305 downloads and had only been added to the repository on the 12th August this year.  First analysis revealed that 12% of referrals in August were from Twitter and another 12% from Facebook (33% were internal ORO referrals and another 19% were from Google).  So something had happened on Twitter and Facebook that helped cause a spike in downloads of the item.

So, the first trace of twitter activity was from Rebecca Ferguson (@R3beccaF) herself on 12th August:

This was followed by another tweet by Gabriel Dumouchel (@gdumouchel) on the 18th August:

A blogpost by Willem van Valkenburg was also published on the same day

46970Blogpost

and a Facebook post by Hubert Lalande on the 19th: 46970Facebook Finally, there was a tweet on 13th September by MOOC Knowledge (@MOOCknow):

And if you map that activity against the daily download log, this is what you get:

MOOCTIMELINE

The second item to grab my attention was at Number 12: Gray, Joshua; Franqueira, Virginia N. L. and Yu, Yijun (2016). Forensically-Sound Analysis of Security Risks of using Local Password Managers. In: 1st International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Investigating and Countering Crime, 13 September 2016, Beijing, IEEE. This had been added to ORO on the 26th July and received 200 downloads during August.  The referrals were even more intriguing as nearly half (48%) were from Twitter (a further 18% were internal and 11% were from Google)… so to the twitter trail.

On 13th August the ORO record was tweeted by K.M.Gallagher (@ageis):

Followed on the 15th by Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) with a response from Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin)

It was also posted on EventRegistry on 23rd August:

46871EventRegistry Finally, it was tweeted by the conference organiser (@iRENIC_workshop) as Best Long paper (but with no link!)

and if you map all that activity onto the daily downloads this is what you get:

PASSWORDMANAGERSTIMELINE OK, so my trawl through the social media isn’t exhaustive – I’m sure there are activities I’ve missed, but I think it’s still instructive:

  • Using social media can have an enormous impact on the reach of an Open Access publication
  • The greatest dissemination of a research output may not be the result of an author (or co-authors) intervention in social media – but someone completely off the radar.
  • Twitter and Facebook usage can both impact on the reach of any particular research output, they aren’t mutually exclusive and both serve the required function.
  • Not all tweets are equal, some are more valuable than others.
  • and always add a link to the paper!

Finally, looking at the tweets and posts I was struck at how those that had the most impact on downloads were also the most eye-catching.  These were tweets with photos of the abstract of the conference item or posts with the cover of the MOOC report.  The images certainly makes them stand out in the timeline and there is some thinking to suggest tweets with images and links are more likely to get noticed.