Research Postgraduate support

Research Networks and Communities

A number of online platforms are available for researchers and academics to connect with other researchers, collaborate online, and link your profile to your research outputs online.

• LinkedIn is one of the largest online professional networks. Creating a LinkedIn profile will allow you to connect with experts and researchers across the world. Increasingly LinkedIn in being used to share news and updates. You can also join LinkedIn Groups relevant to your interests. 
   
• Academia is a platform which allows academics and researchers to share research papers. See analytics for any papers you have written that are linked to your personal profile and find the search terms people are using to find your work. 
   
• ResearchGate, allows you to connect with other researchers and collaborate online once you creating a profile on the site.
   
• Mendeley as well as being a free reference management tool, Mendeley offers an academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
   
• Research Professional will connect you to a Staffordshire University account. The site provides news, updates and alerts to funding opportunities.

Vitae

Vitae is a useful support  and resource site and is the global leader in supporting the professional development of researchers. They are a non-profit programme, part of the Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC) Ltd and have over 50 years’ experience of enhancing the skills of researchers.
 

ORCID

There are a number of tools to allow you start to develop your academic profile. The best of these is ORCID.  It is a nonprofit organisation which provides you with a persistent digital identifier (your unique ORCID ID) that you own and control. This will distinguish you from every other researcher - even those who might share your name!

• More information on using your ORCID ID at Staffs.
   

Connected papers

Connected Papers helps you to find and explore papers relevant to your research area in a unique, visual way.

You can use Connected Papers to get a visual overview of new research and make sure you haven’t missed an important new paper.

You can spend a long time setting up a literature search on your favourite database and it would be time consuming to keep repeating this to check for new content.  It can also be difficult to know how often to check some sources as update frequency can vary – it could be daily, weekly or monthly.

There may also be websites you visit frequently, or blogs that you like to read, whether these are for academic topics, from experts in your field, job sites or just personal interest.  It may not be possible to find time to check for new information on each separate site every day – and you would not know if new information was available anyway.

 To help you with all of these you set up alerts so that the information comes directly to you rather than you having to find it every day.  This will save time and make your research more effective.

Use Table of Contents alerts

A table of contents (TOCs) alert will notify you with the table of contents from particular journals and articles that match searches for authors names or keywords from article titles

You can usually set up a TOCs alert through the publisher's home page for a journal, or use the services listed below.

Academic blogs are a great source of information for researchers, professors, students or anyone interested in keeping up-to-date with new advances in their fields of interest.

The Thesis Whisperer blog is dedicated to the topic of doing a PhD and completing a dissertation.

The Research Whisperer describes itself as "just like the Thesis Whisperer – but with more money"

 Writing for Research provides a helpful collection of information for any researcher struggling to clearly and creatively communicate their research, or if you simply want to improve your written communications. 

Doctoral Writing SIG

This blog aims to providing a forum for discussions and information sharing pertaining to and the challenges of doctoral writing.  It welcomes submissions from guest writers

The LSE Impact Blog  provides a platform for understanding and increasing the impact of academic research, especially in the social sciences.

A good place to find other blogs which might be relevant to you is the blog search engine Technorati .

A content aggregator gathers information from a range of online sources and puts it in one easy to find place.  It presents the information as a personalised newsletter making it easier for you to stay on top of the latest developments in your field of research. 

The type of information that the aggregators curate can include:

• RSS feeds
• Newsletters
• Blogs
• Table of Contents alerts
• Database search alerts
• YouTube channels

There are many aggregators available both online and as apps for both iOS and Android. Feedly is one of the major ones and good alternatives include Inoreader and  Newsblur.  Most offer free versions, with premium options with additional features also available.

Once you have set up the aggregator set up new items are sent to you and you can link easily back to the original item, and bookmark them to find them later.

An aggregator that concentrates on academic journal articles is Researcher. This uses over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, pre-prints, blogs, universities, podcasts and events across 10 research area.