Announcement
Smart Snacks: Bitesize research sessions from Brookes Library
30-minute lunchtime and evening sessions to enhance your research skillset
For researchers
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The Library is here to support your research, the communication of your research findings, and the development of your research profile through a variety of specialist help, resources and services. Please explore these webpages for more information.
Each semester, we offer short training sessions that introduce researchers to the key ideas in the topics that we support.
These sessions include topics like copyright, literature searching, how to publish your work open access, and building your research profile.
Smart Snacks are bitesize, 30 minute sessions with a short presentation followed by an opportunity to ask questions. Choose between lunchtime and early evening slots.
Topics vary each semester, but you can also find a video archive of previous sessions on Panopto when they become available. You will need your Brookes log in details to access the video archive.
For advice on getting started with your literature review and links to a range of useful cross-disciplinary information sources, take a look at our Discovering research page.
The Library's course resource help pages include information on subject specific resources, training, support for referencing and guides.
The Library can provide specialist help with finding information and resources for your research. We can assist you in accessing quality resources, including books, journals, databases, conference proceedings, theses and grey literature. We can also provide tips and techniques for developing search strategies, keeping up to date with your research area, managing and organising references using software services such as EndNote. We offer training and support via 1:1 appointments and email.
Staff and researchers can find the contact details for their Academic Librarian here to request support. All other students should please email library@brookes.ac.uk for assistance.
The main role of the Library's Open Research Team is to support staff and student researchers at Oxford Brookes with sharing, disseminating, and publishing their research findings so that they are available to local or global academic and public communities. We are:
- Research Outputs Manager: Joseph Ripp:
- Open Research Librarians: Aaron Worsley-Burke and Isabel Virgo
- Digital Infrastructure Manager: Hazel King
- Library Assistant: Sarah Floate
For more information about open access publishing, please see our Open Access web page.
Research metrics
- For an introduction to research metrics please read our Research Metrics Information Sheet.
- There are two main types of research metrics:
- Bibliometrics are a way to quantify the readership of research publications in the academic community based on the number of times that the publications are referenced in other academic publications. There are many bibliometrics services and each one may have a unique set of proprietary metrics. Oxford Brookes has a subscription to the Web of Science database which includes a set of bibliometric services at the levels of both the article (e.g. Times Cited) and journal (e.g. Journal Impact Factor).
- Altmetrics are similar to Bibliometrics in that they try to quantify the reach of research publications, but instead of relying on academic citations they instead draw upon how often the publication is mentioned on social media, in the news, in governmental documents, and on other online platforms. The leading service for Altmetrics is probably Altmetric.com - we have linked RADAR to Altmetric.com so that any record with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and that has an Altmetric score greater than 0 will display an Altmetric.com badge in the Related Resources section at the bottom of the page (e.g. this output with a very high Altmetric score). The information from Altmetric.com may indicate where research 'impact' (i.e. affecting a change beyond the academic community) has happened (e.g. if it has been cited in a government policy document).
- Publish or Perish is a tool that some researchers use for calculating the bibliometrics of their own research publications. There is a detailed user manual here.
- Whilst bibliometrics and altmetrics can offer a useful perspective on the reach of research publications they can be misunderstood and misapplied. Initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (also known as DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics argue for the responsible use of metrics in research assessment. Oxford Brookes University is a signatory of DORA and is fully committed to implementing the principles of open, responsible and fair research assessment.
Developing your research profile
Here are two resources created by external institutions to help you develop your research profile:
- Vitae: a non-profit programme supporting the professional development of researchers
- UK Research and Innovation advice on developing a career in research
Intellectual Property and Copyright
- Oxford Brookes has an 'Intellectual property policy and regulations' document that can be accessed from the Policies and codes of practice webpage.
- One key aspect of the policy is that Oxford Brookes has waived the intellectual property rights that the institution could exercise over the research publications that Oxford Brookes research staff produce, meaning it belongs to the authors themselves.
- The Open Research Team recommend that researchers consider the value of their intellectual property before giving the copyright of their publications to a publisher as part of a publishing contract. Some scholarly publishers only request the licensing rights of the publications rather than the copyright, which means that the authors retain ownership of the content of the publications.
ISBNs and DOIs
- The Open Research Team (openaccess@brookes.ac.uk) can assign either an ISBN or DOI to your Oxford Brookes publication, depending on whether it is published in print or online.
- ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) are unique identifiers for your print publications (primarily books) that are published by you or Oxford Brookes University. The cost of an ISBN is £91 and you will be required to deposit a copy of the publication in at least one of the legal deposit libraries (e.g. the British Library).
- DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) are unique identifiers for your online publications (books, reports, research data, etc.) that are published by you or Oxford Brookes University. DOIs are free though the expectation is that the publication will exist in Radar (Oxford Brookes' institutional repository).