CUL Research Skills 2020-2021

Most people have online profiles and, as a researchers, your online presence offers many rich opportunities. It is helpful to be aware of tools and tips that can help you boost your visibility online, as well as common mistakes to avoid.

In this course, you will:

• begin to develop your online research profile by making yourself visible to others in a way(s) that suits you.
• learn what an ORCID is and how to obtain one.
• learn what your Symplectic Elements account is for and begin to make it work for you
• review your current visibility and consider the next steps

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

Copyright law is a complex field with direct relevance for researchers who need to protect their own intellectual work and use work written by others, and most importantly must avoid accidentally infringing copyright. This course provides you with basic knowledge you can apply to your research practice.

The course covers:

• fundamentals of copyright and why it’s important
• what to do if you want to use someone else’s work
• how to protect and share your own work
• how licenses can be used to make it easier to reuse works

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

This online course follows the whole process of public a monograph or other academic book, from making the initial decisions, to what to do once you have the finished book in your hands.

You’ll learn:

• key considerations when turning your thesis into a monograph
• how to choose the best publisher for you
• how Open Access monographs work
• how to write a great proposal
• what to expect from the peer review and publishing process

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

This online module covers the basic skills you need if you are preparing to publish in academic journals.

It will help you to:

• plan a publication strategy and choose the right journals for you
• avoid the snares of predatory publishers
• navigate the peer review process
• understand Open Access publishing and what it means for your publications

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

As a researcher, you will collect a lot of data. Whether that data takes the form of spreadsheets, recordings, images, bibliographies, or something entirely different, it's crucial that you manage it well throughout your projects. Doing so will help you to work more efficiently, avoid data disasters, and build your professional reputation.

In this course, you'll learn:

• how to store and backup up data
• how to organise data
• what to do with protected data (personal or commercially sensitive)
• why sharing data is important and how to do it
• how to write Data Management Plans

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

Data, Metrics, Key Performance Indicators... these terms are everywhere these days, as we increasingly seek hard data to monitor and improve the quality of many of the things we do. Research metrics can be very useful, but they also come with important caveats, so we need to be responsible in how we use these tools.

In this module, you will learn:

• the meaning of common metrics such as Journal Impact Factor and H-index
• what are the main limitations of metrics
• a better, responsible approach to using metrics

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

Have you ever searched for articles on a topic and returned thousands of results... or none? Are you always defaulting to Google Scholar and wondering if there’s a better way of doing things? Are you starting to look into a new topic and feel overwhelmed and unsure where to start? Then this online course is for you.

We will look at the three stages of a successful literature search:

• planning a strategy and identifying the right key words
• searching using the right tools and maintaining accurate records
• evaluating results and refining search parameters

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.