Category Archives: Scholarly Publishing

Highlighting, Measuring, and Managing Your Research

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Are you a graduate student or faculty member? Do you want to understand the current scholarly landscape for measuring, highlighting, and sharing your research?

zotero   academia   webofscience

Tools like Scopus, Web of Science, and Journal Citation Reports provide indicators of research productivity. Portals like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Humanities Commons, and Google Profiles allow researchers to share their work and network with other scholars. Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley make organizing and sharing sources a snap. Publishing in open access venues and posting your research to scholarly repositories can enhance your research impact. Familiarity with these new tools and strategies helps researchers find colleagues, collaborators, and funders, as well as facilitates the tenure and promotion process.

The Temple University Libraries will be offering a series of four workshops in the Digital Scholarship Center on highlighting, measuring, and managing your research. Bring your laptop or borrow one in the DSC.

scopus   researchgate   mendeley

Workshop 1: Managing Your Research
Wednesday, March 29, 11-12, DSC

  • Attendees will gain an understanding of the features of these reference management and sharing tools and their areas of overlap with academic social networks. They will understand some key functional and disciplinary considerations when selecting the proper tool.
  • Register for Workshop 1

Workshop 2: Developing Your Scholarly Profile
Wednesday, April 5, 11-12, DSC

  • The professional and ethical uses of academic social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia as well as preferences of scholars in different disciplines will be explored.  We will talk about ORCiD and other researcher IDs and how they can be used to enhance your online profile.
  • Register for Workshop 2

Workshop 3: Amplifying Your Research Impact
Wednesday, April 12, 11-12, DSC

  • Attendees will learn how to effectively promote and share their research online. We will discuss best practices for using social media, explain how to deposit research outputs in disciplinary repositories, and explore tools and platforms that can help authors expand their readership.
  • Register for Workshop 3

Workshop 4: Measuring Research Impact
Wednesday, April 19, 11-12, DSC

  • Attendees will gain strategies for identifying and measuring their research impact using available online tools. Important buzzwords like citation metrics, impact factors, and the h-index will be explained and applied in a variety of disciplinary contexts.
  • Register for Workshop 4

Ancient Thebes, in and out of time

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Daniel Berman

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What is the relationship between the stories we tell about a city and the “real” history? Stories float from person to person as neighborhoods rise and fall, institutions develop and spread, and natural and manmade events bring gradual or catastrophic change. The media adds an additional layering as it appeals to civic loyalty and commitment in spreading the news.The real history is always somewhere right beyond our grasp, as the competing and conflicting narratives of individuals and institutions reflect a range of motives, from altruistic to selfish to just plain confused. Myths and legends grow up around a city because stories help us establish our connection to spaces and places and fix our personal and communal identity. Often the veracity of stories is less imporant than the feelings they evoke. This is true of Philadelphia, Paris, New York, or any other city.

But how does the historian, the narratologist, the archaeologist tell the difference between the real and the imagined, and what is the relationship between the two? In his new book Myth, Literature, and the Creation of the Topography of Thebes, Professor Daniel Berman attempts to reconstruct the ancient topography of Thebes through two, often conflicting, sources, the ancient literature and the contemporary archaeological record. Thebes, continuously occupied from the Mycenean period to the present day, is the ancient city of Herakles, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Antigone of Greek myth. It was an important dramatic site in Greek epic and lyric poetry, Classical tragedy, and the literature of the Hellenistic period. But behind and layered within mythic Thebes, there is also a very real city that has long experienced the beating pulse of everyday life. As you will learn in this interview, it is hardly a straightforward task to disambiguate the real and the imagined city, as these two elements became entangled so long ago.

I spoke to Daniel Berman on July 22, 2015.

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—Fred Rowland

Open Access Journals and Textbooks

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Nick ShockeyNicole Allen

 

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Colleges and universities face major financial challenges as state and federal funding levels fall and few new revenue sources can adequately fill the gap.  Tuition has already been raised to unsustainable levels, as aggregate student debt recently reached $1 trillion. Higher educational institutions are seeking to be more “entrepreneurial” in order to generate new revenues, but this is a rather slow process in most cases. These issues were pressing even before the housing meltdown in 2008. Now they are urgent.

With this context in mind, the Temple University Libraries are interested in exploring ways that the Internet can be used to reconceptualize and reconfigure how research and educational materials are delivered. If successful, this might both improve research and educational performance at the same time that costs are lowered. As part of the sixth annual Open Access Week (Oct. 22 – Oct. 28, 2012), the Temple University Libraries invited Nick Shockey, director of student advocacy for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and manager of the Right to Research Coalition, and Nicole Allen, director of Student PIRG’s Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, to discuss “The Connection between Open Access and Open Educational Resources: Exploring New Publishing Models.”

Before they’re presentation, they sat down to speak with me about open access journals and open educational resources.

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 —Fred Rowland