Creating Accounts in EBSCO databases

You can create your own log-in within these databases and save results to your own personal folder.

To create your account, simply click on the ‘sign in’ option along the top menu and then choose to create an account.

Sign in on Ebsco

The next time you log into an EBSCO database you can then ‘Sign in’ using your EBSCO user name and start adding things to your folder.  That way you’ll always have a record of the useful articles and reports you found.

When you are logged into your account the EBSCO symbol next to the search box will look like this:

My Ebsco

 

 

Tips on privacy and managing professional identities

facebook privateSomething which always causes concern when people mention social media or Web 2.0 is privacy and managing a professional personal balance.

One aspect of privacy is the information we choose to share and how that reflects on our professional identities.

 

This presentation from the University of Bath gives a very good overview of how to manage your professional identity:

Not everybody will want to be totally anonymous but in our online world it is important to be informed about privacy.

Take note of the privacy options available and adjust the settings where necessary when signing up to a new service. Many sites will give you a variety of options allowing you to set the privacy settings at a level to suit you. This will include an option to keep your whole profile private, or open to only those users you choose to share your information with.

But remember the more information we share the less control we have of it (This light hearted video is a good reminder).

Fact: Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the United States Constitution (minus amendments) (Bilton, N., 2010. Price of Facebook? Start clicking! New York Times 12 May, p.B8 )

This page has some advice on how to keep social media private – it is aimed at teachers but the instructions are relevant.

The University has some social media guidelines which I would suggest you take a look at.

If you wish you can set your blog so search engines won’t find it easily by going to Dashboard > Settings > Reading  then select “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”

Adapted from http://23thingswarwick.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/managing-your-online-identity.html under creative commons license and Emily Allbon’s presentation on Upgrade from City

 

Tools for finding Impact Factors

  • Journal Citation Reports via Web of Knowledge.

This is the key standard for Impact Factor data.  Available at RHUL: http://eresources.rhul.ac.uk/kb/JCR

Download the application from the website – you should be able to install it on your PC.  It uses data from Google Scholar, so it picks up titles not included in JCR, such as reports and other non peer-reviewed materials.  The results are therefore widely different from JCR and should not be directly compared.

Data is still being developed as this service is quite new.  It’s more about the number of author citations than about journal impact factors.

  • Scopus

Good subject coverage, but uses a different way of calculating impact factors from JCR so it is not possible to compare between the two. Available at RHUL: http://eresources.rhul.ac.uk/kb/Scopus

Takes data directly from JCR, but doesn’t usually include the most recent report data.

Google Search tips

The tips below are useful when searching Google and other databases.

Search term example  Explanation 
“ethical consumer” Use double quotes (“”) if you want Google to search a phrase in that exact order
beverages -tea Type a minus (-) sign immediately before the term you want to exclude. The minus sign should be placed immediately before the word preceded by a space. This search retrieves items on various beverages other than tea
“fair trade” tea OR coffee Google’s default is to search all the words you type in your search. If you want it to search either one or several words, you can use the OR operator (note that OR must be typed in upper-case)
“student protest” 1960..1970 If you want to limit the result to pages covering the subject within a specified date (e.g. 1960-1970) type the date separated by two stops (..) and no spaces
~school If you want to search for synonyms place the tilde ~ immediately in front of the word or phrase. Eg ~school will retrieve pages on college, academy, university, education, etc.
consum* Insert an asterisk (*) as a wildcard symbol. This allows stem or word variation searches. For example typing consum* will retrieve material on consumer, consumers, consumerism, consumption, etc.

Useful Tools: Evernote

The Research Pile
No more piles of notebooks

Evernote is a web application which is also available to download on to mobile devices, desktop PCs, lap tops and just about every computer. This means that you can literally use it anywhere and it will sync with on all your devices and the website.

Why use it?

* You can log on to the web version (http://www.evernote.com/) anywhere with an internet connection and you can share your notes so it is a great way of quickly creating a simple web page or putting a plan together.
* You can clip all or part of a webpage into a note by using the web clipping tool (this is easier to install at work on Firefox than on Internet Explorer).
* You can create checklists so you can tick the boxes to keep track of what you have done.
* You can tag notes so notes in different notebooks can all use the same tage and be found on a search.
* If you are using it on a mobile device you can add a location so you can see all notes made at that location by you.

Evernote is particularly useful for projects as this video shows:

Examples of Evernote uses

Helen

RSS Feeds

What are RSS feeds?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. An RSS feed is a way for you to receive updates to different websites without having to visit them. You can also use RSS feeds to publicise information about your own work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU


How do they help me, as a reader?
  • Save time
  • Keep Up to date
  • Everything is in one place

 

You will know if a page has an RSS feed as you will see a button (usually orange) similar to these: RSS logo RSS icon RSS XML icon

Clicking on one of those orange symbols will give you the URL (web address) for the RSS feed.


So how do I get started?
  • To receive a single feed by e-mail: look out for a “subscribe by e-mail” link on the website you want to watch.
  • To watch a handful of feeds you could create a start using an aggregator such as Google ReaderNewsGator’s suite of readers (including one for smart phones),Feedreader and FeedPixel.com.
How do I find RSS feeds that I want to look at?
  • Check if websites/online journals you use a lot have RSS feeds (look out for the orange logos).
  • Collect RSS feeds as you find them.
  • Search an RSS directory. You may find that your feed reader has its own directory, or you can do an Internet search for “RSS feed directory”.
  • When you run a search online, such as on Google or in a library-provided database of scholarly content, look out for the option to create an RSS feed for that search so that you will be alerted when new items matching your search criteria are found. You may have to explore advanced options or settings to set such a feed up.
  • If there is no RSS feed for a page that you think would be really useful, programs like Feedity can be used to create an RSS feed for that page.

 

I have an aggregator. What now?

Now you need to subscribe to some feeds. With either a web based aggregator or a desktop reader usually all you need to do is:

  • Click on the RSS or XML logo button on the web page you find interesting.
  • Copy and paste the URL (i.e. the Web address) from the rss feed page into your aggregator.
  • Some browsers/browser extensions will recognise that there is an RSS feed on a page and offer you an RSS button in the toolbar, which will link to your RSS feed reader for you and add that feed to your collection.

When feeds start to appear in your aggregator, clicking on the headline will take you to a page with more information.

Further Information

Academic Productivity – http://www.academicproductivity.com/2006/howto-rss-feeds-for-academic-use/

Navigating New Media Frontiers – http://chronicle.com/article/Navigating-New-Media/47962/

Educause Report on RSS – http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7024.pdf

Dropbox

Dropbox is excellent for anybody who uses more than one computer (which is probably most of us). Dropbox allows you to access files saved in it anywhere.

Why should you use Dropbox:

Dropbox is one such service that keeps track of your documents, files, photos and videos, using cloud storage to synchronize files across the internet so that they can be shared amongst users, between computers, and any mobile device that can access the internet. Importantly, Dropbox actively encourages users to share files with others by setting you up with a “Public Folder” when you register for an account. It is the only folder on Dropbox that automatically creates a public “link” to every file you put into it. Sharing the file is then straightforward. Simply click on the public folder, and right click on the file you want to share. Navigate to the Dropbox menu and click “Copy Public Link”. You can then save the link to your clipboard and paste it into any web browser you want (such as Twitter, for example). If you want to share a file with a limited number of individuals, you do not need to use the public folder. Simply create a subfolder of the files you want to share, right click it, navigate to “Options” and click “Share this folder”, you can then add the email addresses of your collaborators to the text field.

Warning

Dropbox is great for most files but if you are using anything that may be confidential then you may want to stick with the university’s Y files as the ownership of data in Dropbox is a grey area.

 

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking services allow you to save or bookmark your favourite web sites online and to share them with others. Using a Social bookmarking service is like saving favourites to Internet Explorer or any other web browser but with added benefits:

  • You can access your bookmarks from any computer or device with an internet connection
  • You can share your bookmarks with others (although you can also keep any that you don’t want to share private!)
  • You can “tag” bookmarks with relevant keywords to help you (and others) to retrieve them easily.

Services 
The following services offer Social Bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo, Digg, Connotea and Stumbleupon. For a longer list see http://www.philb.com/iwantto/webpages.htm

More about Tagging
Tagging is a facility used by many Web 2.0 services – not just bookmarks. It allows you to associate keywords or phrases with particular items (for example pictures, videos, bookmarks, catalogue records etc) in order to make them easier for you and others to retrieve. You can add as many tags as you like which makes it easy to describe items that cover many different concepts.

It is also possible to use “shared tags”. These are tags used by people who want to share items on a particular topic. To facilitate this, users tag relevant items with an agreed shared tag. For example if you look to the right on this blog you will see a Tag cloud of all the tags related to posts on this blog. Click on a tag and you will find other posts with that tag.


Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff)
Are you fed up of finding good websites and then not being able to re-find them? Do you want to share useful websites with your colleagues? Then Diigo could be for you! Diigo allows you to save and share your favourite websites. It works in a similar way to the Delicious service that some of you may be familiar with (but Delicious is up for sale and faces an uncertain future).
With Diigo you can:

  • Bookmark your favourite websites and then access them from any PC that you login to.
  • Tag (or index!) your favourite websites so that you can easily search for them later on.
  • Highlight or annotate your chosen websites, making notes that will be there the next time you visit the site.
  • Share your favourite websites with colleagues. You might want to think about sharing sites across your team.
  • Search for websites and view other people’s reviews and comments.

This video explains a bit more about Diigo.

 

Technorati

Technorati

Technorati is a search engine for finding blogs and blog posts on your research and personal interests. Technorati ranks blogs based on linking behaviour, so it is easy to find popular and reputable blogs. Technorati only finds English-language blogs.

General Blog Search

Technorati is a great way for researching content across the blogosphere. You can search for blogs or for blog posts.

It now also publishes unique high quality content addressing many popular topics.

Find Topics for New Content

Technorati.com is a great way to find what is most popular in the Blogosphere. Bloggers use is regularly to find popular content ideas to write about.

Determine Blog Authority and Ranking

Technorati rank and authority awarded by the site to all blogs is widely accepted by professionals as the leading measure for blog authority and ranking throughout the world. It is one of the industry standards for measuring a blog’s success.
How to use Technorati to publish and promote your research.
If you use a blog to record your research then register it with Technorati. Once you create your free account, you will be able to register multiple blogs with Technorati.

Use it to connect with bloggers in similar research areas. Connecting with other bloggers and building relationship is essential to succeed in blogging. Technorati is a great place to identify bloggers so you can follow them on their social networks, etc

 

Reddit

Reddit is a social news site that allows users to rank online stories. Reddit is a great tool for finding non-mainstream news, commentary and scholarly information. Reddit–as described on its about page – “is a place friendly to thought, relationships, arguments, and to those that wish to challenge those genres.” Running off of an open-source system, reddit readers, “redditors” vote on which issues or topics are most interesting. The topics with the most votes rise to the topic of a discussion thread and those with the least votes sink to obscurity. It is a democratic system for sharing news, asking questions, and engaging in myriad topics with people across the globe. (There are education-related reddit pages — http://www.reddit.com/r/education).

Here is an example of searching Library in Libraries.

Reddit