Research Bites 2015 announced!

The programme for the ResearchBites 2015 has now been announced. These short, informal seminars will be held in the Library 2nd Floor Workshop A on Wednesdays at 1pm throughout July and August, and feature topics relevant to researchers at all levels. Whether you want a quick refresher on a single topic or a comprehensive updating of your information and research skills, you will find something for you.    

Topics for this year's seminars include: 

• Refined Literature Searching
• Finding Grey Literature
• Ruling your References: Ruling EndNote
• Staying Legal - your PhD & copyright law
• Research Data Management: responsibilities, practice and support
• Raising your Research Profile -
• How influential is your research?
• Open Access Publishing

You can find the full programme and more details about each topic on the Research Bites 2015 webpage.

Watch all the Research Bites 2014 on Aston Replay

Research Bites 2014 were a success! The short, informal seminars held on Wednesdays throughout July and August featured topics relevant to researchers at all levels. Every seminar was captured by Aston Replay and they are all now available to watch online.

Follow the links below to access the Aston Replay recordings, PowerPoint slides (annotated in many cases) and further information (including how each seminar maps to vitae's Researcher Development Framework) for each of the topics:

• Level Up: enhance your literature searching
• Measuring Research Impact
• Distinguish yourself: get an ORCiD
• Open Access publishing – an important growth area at Aston
• Safeguarding Research Data
• Get more citations: strategies for increasing the visibility of your work
• What’s new? Getting the most from SCOPUS and Web of Science
• Cite it! Sort it! EndNote it!

If you have any feedback on these seminars or further questions about any of these topics, contact your Information Specialist.  

Catch up on Research Bites 2013

Research Bites 2013 was a success!  The short, informal seminars held on Wednesdays throughout July and August featured topics relevant to researchers at all levels. Every seminar was captured by Aston Replay and they are all now available to watch online. 

Topics for this year's seminars included:

• Fine-tune your literature searches
• Measuring Research Impact: yours and others’
• Using Endnote to organise your references
• What can Open Access publishing do for you? 
• Managing your Research Data 

You can find more details about the topics and a link to the Aston Replay recording for each in the full programme on the Research Bites 2013 webpage.
If you would like to download the PowerPoint slides for any of the topics, you can also access the Aston Replay recordings, PowerPoint slides and further information via Library Matters on Blackboard > Info for Research > Research Bites 2013.

If you missed your opportunity to recieve a copy of vitae's publication, The informed researcher: Because interacting with information is at the very heart of your research, which features a self-assessment tool for information literacy and maps these skills against the Researcher Development Framework, you can download a copy instead.

2012 edition of Journal Citation Reports now available

The 2012 edition of the Journal Citation Reports from Thomson Reuters has now been published.  This will give you the most up-to-date Impact Factors for world-leading journals indexed by the Web of Science.

The Impact Factor for a journal is the average number of citations per article published in that journal.  The 2012 edition considers citations during 2012 to articles published during 2010 and 2011.

You can access the Journal Citation Reports by clicking on the Additional Resources tab within the Web of Knowledge, or directly via the A-Z Resource List.

If you would like further information about Impact Factors, the Journal Citation Reports, or bibliometrics in general, please contact your Information Specialist.

Research Bites 2013 announced!

The programme for the Research Bites 2013 seminars has now been announced. These short, informal seminars will be held in MB146 on Wednesdays at 1pm throughout July and August, and feature topics relevant to researchers at all levels. Whether you want a quick refresher on a single topic or a comprehensive updating of your information and research skills, you will find something for you.

Topics for this year's seminars include:

• Fine-tune your literature searches
• Measuring Research Impact: yours and others’
• Using Endnote to organise your references
• What can Open Access publishing do for you? 
• Managing your Research Data 

You will also receive a copy of vitae's publication, The informed researcher: Because interacting with information is at the very heart of your research, which features a self-assessment tool for information literacy and maps these skills against the Researcher Development Framework.

You can find the full programme and more details about each topic on the Research Bites 2013 webpage.

Impact Factors 2011

At the end of last month, Thomson Reuters announced the release of the 2011 Impact Factors, available via the Journal Citation Reports (part of the Web of Knowledge).

The 2011 Impact Factor for a journal title is calculated as the average number of citations received in 2011 by articles published in that journal title during 2009 and 2010.

One interesting feature of the 2011 release was the exclusion of 51 journal titles due to "anomalous citation patterns" - it appears Thomson Reuters believed these journals to be engaging in practices designed to artificially inflate their Impact Factors.

For more information on Impact Factors, or guidance on finding out what the Impact Factor for a particular journal is, please contact your Information Specialist.

Article-level citation data: why and how?

At a conference I attended a few weeks ago, Anna Dickinson from the REF team at HEFCE gave an overview of the REF for a group of librarians supporting research.  One of the key points she made was that none of the sub-panels assessing submissions for REF will be using journal title-level citation data (e.g. Impact Factors or similar) to assess submitted research outputs, but that 11 of the 36 sub-panels will be provided with information about article-level citation data, including contextual data for that subject area.

So, a journal article submitted to one of the 11 sub-panels will be supplied to the members of that sub-panel with details of how many times that particular journal article has been cited in the literature, and the number of citations that a "top" journal article in that subject area might expect to receive.

If you want to find out what the article-level citation data for a specific journal article is, then you will need to use Scopus, the citation data provider for REF.  Search for the article of interest in Scopus, and you will see the "Cited by" information in a box on the right hand side of the page.

For more information about the use of citation data in the REF, including information about which panels are using this data and how the contextual citation data will be calculated (not yet available at the time of writing), see the REF 2014 web page.