Raising your research profile

IPGC Conference24-25 Sept 2013

Raising your research profile

Eileen ShepherdPrincipal Faculty Librarian: Science & Pharmacy

Rhodes University Library

“As a graduate student preparing for a career

in research, you have two jobs:

(1) do some good research (2) build a community around your research topic.” Phil Agre, Networking on the Network (2005)

How?(amongst other things) ……

by networking and

becoming known

One way to do this is by using technology

Some examples of technologies researchers can use

email

websites

online discussion groups

register on academic research sites

use social networking software

(1)Register on academic or professional

research sites, e.g.:

ResearcherID

ResearchGate

Academia.edu

LinkedIn

http://www.researcherid.com

• a solution to author ambiguity problem

• as you are assigned a unique identifier

• manage publication lists, track citations & your h-index

• showcase your publications

• identify potential collaborators

Free registration – do it today!

and put (South)African research on the map!

Searching by institute (36 for NMMU):

By author – Dr G Kerley (NMMU):

Citation metrics for Dr Kerley:

Get an e-badge, see collaborators, etc.

Analyse collaborators by country, authors, institution, research area:

http://www.researchgate.net/

• Research visibility

• Connection with other researchers

• Collaboration with other researchers

• Stats and metrics for your research output

(2) Social networking for researchers

Why on earth would I want to do this?

A few reasons:

to raise your research profile

to get noticed & cited

to find collaborators

to measure your research impact (apart from citations) by means of altmetric

Altmetric: a new way of measuring research

impact

Every day, thousands of scholarly papers are being discovered, discussed and shared.

.

Who collects the information?

http://www.altmetric.com/

creates and maintains a cluster of servers that watch social media sites, newspapers,

government policy documents and other sources for mentions of scholarly articles.

“We bring all the attention together to compilearticle level metrics”

Altmetric bookmarklet:

This is what it looks like in action:

http://impactstory.org/

So,

By sharing, using social networking tools:

TwitterMendeleyCite-u-LikeGoogle+DeliciousBlogsLinkedInRedditFacebookand many more………………..

Publishers are starting to implement social media options at

article levelSome examples:

Nature

PLOS

Wiley

Taylor & Francis

@RhodesResearch https://twitter.com/RhodesResearch

Twitter feeds in RU LibGuides, e.g. Biochem http://ru.za.libguides.com/

Thanks for listening

Questions, suggestions, comments?