Skip to main content

Posts

To conclude...

And now this the time to summarise all these different Things (22?) that I learned through The 23 Things for Research Programme. As a whole, I believe the programme was very insightful and I would definitely recommend it to anyone starting a PhD. Building or improving your professional online presence is the secret of the success. Maybe yes, maybe no... Who knows? Throughout this programme, I developed a cohesive and up-to-date profile in LinkedIn and Researchgate. The programme helped me to think about my personal brand, to set up Mendeley, my Reference Management tool and to recognise the importance of other tools for exploring source of information (Wikipedia), images online (Flickr, Pinterest), sharing findings (Prezi Google Public Data Explorer), disseminating research work (Open Access), maximising research impact (Bibliometrics and Altmetrics), connecting with other researchers (Webinars, Hangouts, Doodle), sharing data (Google Drive), searching for funding (Research Prof
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Grab the opportunity and Promote yourself!

Yes! Grab any opportunity. Funding opportunities and potential funding sources like Reseacrh Professional webpage and Euraxess are necessary for starting, being productive and completing a PhD project. I signed up Research Professional and I started to look for research funding opportunities in my field. Creating and maintaining a personal website is an amazing opportunity to promote yourself, tell the world who you are, what you do what your mission and your GOALS. A standalone website could definitely reflect your personality and your achievements better than any other social media like LinkedIn or Twitter. Creating my own Website could be included in my long-term plans (goals?). Until then I can promote my research work through a cohesive and up-to-date LinkedIn profile. Also, I am currently completing my profile page at surrey.ac.uk. Learning how to promote yourself and how to grab an OPPORTUNITY is a skill that you should develop and train while in your PhD studies! 
Post a Comment
Read more

Stay connected ... to your research

Nowadays dissemination is acknowledged as an important component of the research process. Crowdsourcing tools, webinar tools, scheduling tools and data sharing tools could all be invaluable in disseminating one's research work. Crowdsourcing could be useful in the areas of psychology, but not directly in my current research project. In general, engaging the public in the world of science could be interesting and a potentially effective approach. In fact, it means that research community calls the public to be involved in a particular research effort. The concept is: "Let's recognise and incorporate the citizen science into our research". I regard Webinars and specifically Hangout and Skype as the most important tools to connect researchers, participants and generally all people together. My supervisors, my colleagues and I regularly hold meetings over Skype or Hangout. The distance does not still matter in the age of the Internet. Scientists are able to com
Post a Comment
Read more

Open access and measuring Productivity ?

It was when I recognized the Surrey Research Insight, an open access repository, which is actually a database of open access academic papers. Surrey Research Insight is a library service which allows free access to UoS produced content and offers journal subscriptions to several scientific journals for all students and academic staff. Recently, I submitted my first manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal, hence, I have not had much exposure in managing the Open access status of my papers. The 23 things for Research programme comes to a poignant time, as I will be able to consider seriously an immediate open access for my paper in future. The concept of measuring the academic impact, the volume of publications using a number of variables and complicated algorithms is a contemporary trend to measure, assess and compare the PRODUCTIVITY.  Bibliometrics and Altmetrics tools are all different indicators of the volume of your publications. I would prefer to hold the positive features of
Post a Comment
Read more

How to share research online.

Starting to consider the idea of sharing your research work online is a new opportunity for adapting my piece of scientific work to the public needs. Screencasts can help to share your research in the media world, while softwares like Google public data explorer visualises views and graphs to be better understood using plain language and simple figures. Personally, my first experience of sharing my PhD work in an international Conference was a  Powerpoint presentation. Powerpoint is the basic tool I have used to make and develop my presentations so far. I am also aware that Presi could be an alternative and I should invest some time weekly to learn how to use properly this tool. However, it may be worth giving Presi a second chance the next time I am going to present research data to a public audience!
Post a Comment
Read more

Online means...

Looking at Wikipedia, exploring images online and finding presentations and podacsts are all things that I have met throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. In particular, Wikipedia can be used as the starting point for many research and assignment topics. The information and sources, included in Wikipedia, are accurate and comprehensive. Wikipedia can provide a broad amount of content in the field of Psychology. Regarding the subject directly related to my research, the content was limited. However, Wikipedia is definitely a useful tool for providing the basic information about my project. As regards to the online images, I prefer google searching, Pinterest and Flickr focusing on these images that involve CC license. Furthermore, Instagram and Flickr are also useful for free sharing photos in public. In the course of my studies, I have used many times Power point and Prezi to present my research work at the University and Conferences. I have not used Podcast y
Post a Comment
Read more

Manage your References and Creative Commons

Sunflower by mrhayata,  September 23, 2011, Flickr,   CC BY-SA 2.0 Reference Management Software is an invaluable gift when you start with a PhD project. I had been using "Cite This For Me". However, after exploring the alternative choices I reconsider and I chose Mendeley.  Mendeley combines the best features of several other tools and it has become "my invaluable gift" in managing my vast number of references in my PhD journey. The opportunity of learning about Creative Common Licences and their use were very important for me as I love the idea of sharing my gallery content and being able to reuse online available images. CC licenses like Attribution, ShareAlike, NonComercial, and NonDerivatives can be used to free us and at the same time protect our rights as originators of our creative work. According to the task I explored Flirck to find a nice image! The above image was shared using a CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) As well, I
Post a Comment
Read more