Durham PGR Part-time Summer School 2015 Session: Digital Tools See also: - Presentation (Dr Nick Pearce & Dr Elaine Tan) - Presentation (James Bisset)

1. Digital Tools: Online Resources Guide 1
"Join 7 million researchers, including 45 Nobel Laureates"
ResearchGate allows you to create and build on online profile, visible to other academic and
commercial researchers, and share knowledge, expertise and scientific outputs.
ResearchGate is free to join, and free to leave.
http://www.researchgate.net/
ResearchGate is simple to start an account and start to build your profile, but you will get more
out of it the more you put in.
 Go to the link above
 Click on Join for Free
 Provide your name
 If you have authored any publications, search for these by title, author or DOI.
 Provide your institution, department, institution email and a password
 Select up to 3 disciplines and up to 9 specialisms
 Add any skills or expertise you would like to describe yourself by
 Add a profile picture (either a photo, or a random image)
 Click on Complete sign-up
 Check your email account to authorise, then login and you can edit your profile, and
search for other researchers you may know or wish to "follow".
Once on ResearchGate, you can explore Q&A discussions, jobs and funding opportunities
advertised, or flesh out your profile.
** If adding publications to your profile, make sure you do so only where you are not
breaching copyright law. The majority of publishers require you to transfer copyright of
your work to them before they will accept it for publication. They may then permit you to
post a version of that article in a repository or personal website, but usually not the
published version, and often not on sites such as ResearchGate.
In 2013, Elsevier sent several thousand take-down notices to academia.edu, forcing them
to remove authors publications which did not respect these copyright agreements they
had signed.**
Networking - Research Gate

2. Why not try:
 LinkedIN
 Academia.edu
 Unsolicited "friend" requests
 Endorsements for "skills" you don't see as best 'describing' your value to others
 Spamming of "news from your network" emails
 Requests for endorsements and recommendations
Create an account on ResearchGate
Search for colleagues and other academics in your (broad) discipline of study.
Suggested activity
Alternatives
What you might not like...

3. Digital Tools: Online Resources Guide 2
PIIRUS is an initiative that emerged from and stays in the HE sector, and is managed by the
University of Warwick
PIIRUS is not just about dissemination of research and public engagement. It helps
researchers to find collaborators within their field or from a different discipline and across
countries, institutions, and career stages.
https://www.piirus.com/
It is very easy to create an account, and then create a brief profile which you can then choose to
make visible, or hide, from other researchers.
Just go to the link above, click on Join (using your university email address) and make a start.
Collaboration / Networking - Piirus

4. If you don't want your profile to be visible, just deselect the box on the edit profile pages.
Create a free profile on Piirus.
or
Watch the short video about Piirus at their blog (http://bit.ly/1K1gj77)
or
Have a look at Piirus Twitter feed and follow them https://twitter.com/piirus_com
or
If you have create a profile and aren't sure what it means by ResearcherID or ORCID... ask me.
Suggested activity

5. Digital Tools: Online Resources Guide 3
Evernote is a tool that travels with you for note taking, but which unlike paper notebooks you
can organise and navigate by keyword (or "tag"), add media content, share online and search
across your entire library of notes for a name, word or phrase.
https://evernote.com/
To create an account, simply click on the link above, then click on Sign up now and provide an
email address and password.
You have a choice of how you can access Evernote:-
 Download an app for use on mobile apple or android devices (click on get Evernote for
desktop)
 Download a desktop version for Windows (click on get Evernote for desktop)
 Create an online account and start using in your web browser (click on Create your first
note)
You can also install the Evernote Web Clipper into your browser - a button you can click on
when on an interesting web page to save content into your Evernote account.
Go to https://evernote.com/, create an account and either try taking a note online, or download a
version to your laptop / mobile device.
or
Have a look at the introductory guide at https://evernote.com/evernote/guide/mac/ .
Note-taking - Evernote
Suggested activity

7. Digital Tools: Online Resources Guide 4
N.B. - You can register for a webinar run by Altmetric.com, scheduled for 3pm BST on
Wednesday 8th July - http://www.altmetric.com/blog/webinars/
Altmetrics, or "Alternative Metrics", are a non-traditional means of measuring the "impact"
published scholarly work might have made.
Unlike traditional "bibliometrics", which measure the number (and sometimes source) of
citations in other academic literature, altmetrics look at other data sources, such as article
views, downloads and mentions/shares/discussions in social media and non academic sources.
http://www.altmetric.com/bookmarklet.php
Altmetric is just one provider of altmetric data, and they sell metric analysis tools to publishers
and HEIs.
They also provide access to a free bookmarklet you can install in your browser (accessible at
the link above).
Once installed, when on most journal article pages where a doi is stored, you can click on the
bookmarklet to view altmetric data about that article.
Tracking Impact - Altmetric Bookmarklet

8.  If you have your own laptop with you, try installing the altmetric bookmarklet into your
browser (Chrome, Firefox or Safari - not Internet Explorer)
 Search for some journal articles, and see if it works and identifies any altmetric data.
 You could try some of the example articles below:-
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7383/full/482027a.html
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e70
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2431/11/111/abstract
If you don't have your own laptop with you, or only have internet explorer, instead have a look at
altmetric data for articles in Public Library of Science papers:
 Go to http://www.plosone.org/
 Pick any articles (although perhaps none published to recently)
 Click on the Metrics tab.
 E.G http://www.plosone.org/article/Metrics/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0034905
Suggested activity