Category Archives: Literature searches

Get a Handle on New Scholarly Communication Tools

Since 2013, many scholarly communication tools have come flooding in like an open source tidal wave. In the following blog post from LSE Impact Blog: 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of new tools,  the authors discuss the sheer number of scholarly communication tools that have surfaced over the past few years and provide flowcharts and analysis (based on their own survey-based research) to attempt to deduce how researchers are taking advantage of these resources. The authors suggest, “the push for new tools comes from funders (e.g. demanding data archiving of Open Access) but also from researchers themselves that want to capitalize on the possibilities of the internet in collaborating.” The blog post also includes a database of the authors’ findings, which outlines in detail the functions and features of these communication tools.

 

Visualizing Knowledge Domains

hitchhikers-guide

When it comes to managing research literature searches, in the wise words of Douglas Adams, “don’t panic!” A novel, crowd-sourced concept called “knowledge domain visualization” involves a unique way of managing and organizing those sources. This is especially useful for those in research fields that are inter- and/or cross-disciplinary, when wrestling with information overload, or when you just don’t know where to start your search. Sometimes seeing your data in a different light can produce more effective results.  Read this post on the LSE Public Policy’s Impact Blog to learn more.