Research SupportThe Technology Libraries team offer support and training on various aspects of the research process, so feel free to contact us if you have any questions. If you want to book a one-to-one session for more personalised support, please use our Booking Form.
For resources to support your information and research skills, including Literature Searching and Reviewing, Managing Data, Referencing and Academic Integrity, see our Information Skills page.
For more support on your research, see the Research Skills Guide, the Researcher Development website and the Office of Scholarly Communication's Open Research website.
Sharing your research across different platforms has a number of benefits for researchers, including:
Sharing your research is becoming an increasingly important area of academic practice and scholarly communications. How you share, where you share, and how you are seen online are all important factors to consider. An increasing number of funders are now requiring that your research outputs and any underlying datasets are made openly available.
You can watch a short video introducing the key principles of Sharing your Research below.
PublishingPublishing is a key part of any researcher's career: it is the main way researchers share their research findings with colleagues and the world at large, so that knowledge develops over time and helps to change policy and practice.
Through publishing, you will receive feedback on your work and develop your ideas further. In addition, a strong publication record is also important in developing your research career.
Where to publish is one of the most important decisions you'll make when disseminating your research. It's best to start thinking about this as early as possible, ideally at the very start of each research project.
Ultimately, the decision of where to publish your work as a researcher is up to you. However, there are some things you might want to think about:
You may have heard of the h-index and citation rate. These are just two of many metrics used to calculate the impact of articles, authors and publications. The academic system tends to be weighted in favour of authors who are published in high-impact journals and who have high citation rates. However, reaching the right audience for your work may involve publishing in smaller journals with a more specific focus, or making your work freely available to the public, both of which allow your work to have different types of impact. These sorts of impact are increasingly considered in evaluation exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Fraud in academic publishing has unfortunately become a common occurrence and academics have found themselves paying charges to be published in predatory journals. Before you publish, have a look at the checklist on Think. Check. Submit.
The video below from the Betty and Gordon Moore Library has a useful introduction to Predatory Publishers and how to avoid them.
There are usually several stages to peer review:
This process is a collaboration between editor, reviewers and authors to ensure that the best research is disseminated, and in the best possible form.
Open AccessOpen Access is simply making published research results freely available to anyone with an internet connection rather than keeping those results hidden behind a subscription paywall.
Making research articles Open Access is a requirement for most funders and for the Research Excellence Framework, or REF. It also ensures that they are more discoverable, more accessible, and therefore more likely to be cited.
The Open Access policy landscape in the UK is complex. The University of Cambridge Open Access team can assist researchers with policy compliance and funder requirements.
There are two main routes to open access: Green and Gold.
Green Open Access is making a version of work (usually an author's accepted manuscript) available in an open access repository. These can be institutional such as Apollo the Cambridge repository or subject based, such as arXiv, PubMed Central, RePEc or SSRN.
The easiest way to make your articles Open Access is to upload your accepted manuscripts from your Symplectic Elements home page as soon as they're accepted for publication. The University’s Open Access team will then add it to the University Repository for you and advise on any other requirements that might apply.
The Library Team can provide training and one-to-one advice, and you can also find more information on the University of Cambridge Open Access website, and the Open Access for Administrators and Librarians Guide.
The video below from the Betty and Gordon Moore Library introduces the key principles of Open Access in one minute.
What is an ORCiD?ORCiD stands or Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCiD iD) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. You can connect your ORCiD with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more. You can use your ORCiD to share your information with other systems, ensuring you get recognition for all your contributions, saving you time and hassle, and reducing the risk of errors.
Please note, an ORCiD is for life and it belongs to you. If you leave the University, your ORCiD will not be affected.
A researcher's name alone often isn't enough to reliably identify the author of, or contributor to, a paper published in a scientific journal or a dataset uploaded to a repository. Many researchers share the same name, while others have different names during their career, or different variations of the same one.
For example, R. Jones, Richard Jones, and Richard M Jones could all refer to the same person. A unique identifier for you, which you can associate with your name variations and research works, is a way to ensure that these links can be made accurately and reliably in order to ensure that credit is correctly attributed and reports can be generated with a greater degree of accuracy.
ORCiD accounts can be linked to a variety of other sources including MLA BibLink and arXiv as well as Dimensions and other profile tools such as Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID to draw in relevant information.
Registering your ORCiD is a free online process that should take less than one minute. You own your ORCID record and, after registering for it yourself, you will be able to update or add information by signing into your account.
Step-by-step instructions to register your ORCiD can be found on the ORCiD website.
There are a number of ways in which you can inadvertently end up with multiple ORCiD identifiers, which rather defeats the object. However, there is a feature on ORCID that allows you to remove duplicate records by merging it into your primary ORCID record.
For information on removing or merging duplicate ORCiDs, you can see the ORCiD support page, or the Research Information Moodle (Raven login required).
Once you have an ORCiD, you can add "works" to your record. Works are a record of your research outputs, including publications, data sets, conference presentations, and more. There are several ways you can do this:
Add works by direct import from other systems to import links to your publications and other works to your ORCiD record from other databases. This is the recommended process because it reduces or eliminates errors, and enables a reliable connection between your ORCiD and your works.
Add works using an identifier such as a DOI or PubMed ID.
Importing works from a BibTeX file: Using the BibTeX import tool, you can import your research works from systems that have not yet built a connection with ORCiD.
Add works manually: To add a work manually, start from the Works header, click +Add, then Add manually.
Adding works to your ORCiD means that it can helpfully be used as a central record of your publications and research outputs, which you can link to various other sites such as your personal website, GitHub, LinkedIn, or Symplectic Elements. Dr John Durrell of the Department of Engineering has developed a PHP script on GitHub that downloads and presents an author's ORCiD bibliography.
ORCiD and Symplectic Elements are now integrated such that researchers can create, or connect an existing ORCiD directly from their Symplectic Elements profile.
Simply login to Symplectic Elements and choose the "Automatic Claiming" link from your Publications menu. Step-by-step instructions for linking your ORCiD (and other unique identifiers such as Scopus Author ID) with your Symplectic Elements account can be found on the Research Information website.
Data ChampionsData Champions are local experts on research data management and sharing who can provide assistance and support within their departments. The Data Champions can answer discipline-specific questions and are happy to speak at meetings, deliver training and provide information about research data.
For information about the Data Champions programme across the University, or to become a Data Champion yourself, please see the Data Champions website.
Research resources