Skills: Overview

Sometimes you will be asked to use a scholarly, academic or peer-reviewed source in your assignments. But what does that mean? What is a scholarly source?

The Internet is unbeatable in its scope, accessibility and diversity of sources. So, why take the trouble to use library resources if you can also easily find information on the Internet, right?

The type of information source you use depends on the stage of your literature research. Learn how to select the most appropriate search tools.

Successful searching is largely about being precise. Search techniques - like phrase searching, wildcards, and Boolean operators - can help you search with precision and find what you need.

Learn how to use different search methods - like the 'quick and dirty' method, the snowball (or citation chaining) method and the cited reference method -to find information in databases.

In addition to tracing books and journal articles that you already have references for, sEURch - the library's search engine - is ideal for discovering articles on a topic.

Watch the video Get the most out of Google Scholar and discover how to use this search engine effectively.

Learn how to use Google Books and how it can help you in your research process

Evaluating the results of your literature search isn't easy. How do you find the best resources in the results list for your assignment? Which publications are most useful to read first and which publications could you leave unread for the time being or maybe even discard?

You've searched for publications that yield relevant information for your research question and found a manageable selection of titles. Can you trust an author's analysis and conclusions enough to refer to them in your assignment/research?

Learn how to identify some aspects of good arguments as well as what are some common fallacies used in both non-academic and academic argumentation.

When finding quantitative information like a number, a table, or a whole dataset we want be able to judge its quality to help us select the right information.

Be careful with numbers and figures you find on the internet!

Several University Libraries have developed an approach to let you check the quality of information systematically. There’s a fair degree of overlap between the methods. Evaluation follows and to some degree overlaps with structured searching.

A thesis or assignment should offer an objective, balanced and comprehensive treatment of the chosen topic. Whether information is factual, offers opinions or concerns propaganda is a matter of critical reading and a background check on the author or source.

Non-academic sources are very valuable for scholarly research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. However, as they haven't gone through a process of quality checking before they become available, a lot of online information cannot be used as it is biased or of too low quality in another way. The first step is to find out if you have actually found the original source.

How do you discern between high and low quality online information? First you have to find out who is the author of the information. When you know this, you can start assessing the source.

To make a correct entry in the bibliography at the end of your paper, you need to provide a lot of information about the source publication.

Collecting the information you need to create correct references can be a lot of work. There are tools available, called reference managers, to help you with this.

Here we focus on using the reference manager RefWorks. You'll learn how to add references to your RefWorks database and how to manage them.

Which citation style should you use? And why? There are so many! A citation style is prescribed for term papers, theses and dissertations by your faculty, institute or department.

The sorting order, structure and formatting of references in the bibliography at the end of your paper are determined by the citation style you use. Applying the the rules of a style can be a lot of work. Reference managers, like RefWorks, can do this work for you.

Write-N-Cite is a RefWorks tool that makes it easy to insert citations from your RefWorks database and create bibliographies in papers you are writing in Microsoft Word.

Plagiarism is the use of another author's ideas, words, images, music or other work without disclosing the source. if you copy-paste from another person's work (be it internet, art or print) and fail to mention that you copied it from someone else you commit plagiarism!

To avoid plagiarism in your assignment or thesis, you need to supply references when you include quotes and paraphrased text from another source. How does this work? Do you have to supply references for everything you use?

How do you borrow from a source without plagiarizing? It takes some effort to learn to paraphrase by re-formulating an original text in your own words.

Having an effective routine of proper note-taking and keeping a bibliography can prevent accidental plagiarism. Turnitin can also be used as a tool by students and researchers to identify problematic references in their work.

Protecting the privacy of research subjects is an important professional duty. Better still, is if research subjects benefit from your research. You should be aware of the need to separate identifying characteristics of respondents early on in the data collection and include privacy considerations in the research design. This module includes a template for an ' informed consent form', a handout with the major research organisations issuing guidelines, as well as a video about the recent history of research ethics.

Research data management refers to all aspects of creating, housing, delivering, maintaining, archiving and preserving research data. It is essential to the responsible conduct of research.

While writing your dissertation you may (re)use existing data or create new data. These data sets may contain sensitive data. Sensitive data is frequently classified as: public, internal, confidential or secret. The data classification is important as it determines how you store, share and publish your data.

As researchers we collect personal data. When we do this, we need to ensure that the privacy of respondents is guaranteed, that access to personal data is controlled and that individuals cannot be identified in published results. This requires a set of measures in designing a survey. The increasing popularity of data sharing strengthens the need to consider anonymizing the data.

Making the use of data safe requires taking codes of conduct and official rules into consideration in the design of the data set. A number of techniques exist to anonymize data, which are briefly mentioned in the module.

Erasmus University Rotterdam provides its faculty and staff with a safe, easy and secure way to exchange data with EUR colleagues as well as with colleagues from other universities. This service, SURFdrive, meets the needs of secure exchange of research data, as well as the files that are currently exchanged via public cloud services such as Dropbox. You control which data you share with whom and for how long.

In this module we'll explain why and how to cite datasets. Once you've established a persistent link between your publication and the underlying dataset anyone reading the publication will be able to find the data. Also, anyone looking at your data is able to find your publication. One way to link a dataset to a publication is with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

An introduction to Open Data and the use of Open Data

Why should you publish in Open Access? The core idea is simple: to make the results of your research freely available to everyone, if possible for free.

Where will you publish your next journal article? With thousands of journals available it can be hard to find the right journal for your work. Tools are available to help you create a shortlist of journals.

Tips to identify (potential questionable) journals and publishers and to find Open Access options to publish your article.

How to track the output and impact of your publications. Academic impact can be measured in many ways. It is important to be aware of the various sources and metrics applied, and of its limitations.

The H-index is an author level-metric: it measures the individual academic output of a researcher, taking into account the productivity (the number of publications) and the academic impact (the number of citations received). The height of the H-index depends on the source you use to determine the H-index.

Journal level metrics, for example the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), the SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and CiteScore, measure the influence of a journal, taking into account the number of citations received by articles published in the journal.

With altmetrics you can discover the use of your work beyond academic citations: who tweets or blogs about your research? Which policy documents cite your research? The analysis tool Altmetric Explorer helps you answering these kind of questions.

How can you make sure that your publications can be found easily in citation databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar? By managing your author profiles, such as Web of Science ResearcherID, ORCID iD, Google Scholar Citations profile or Scopus Author ID.

Scholarly collaboration networks, for example ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley, give you the opportunity to be found, to showcase your interests, your work and yourself and to follow fellow researchers. These networks are also used to share and to access scientific articles.