The announcement of the closure of Microsoft Academic later this year, may have left the research community largely unmoved, although its demise has significant implications for those working with the service’s substantial database. Here, Aaron Tay, Al…
Category: Discovery Tools
A broken system – why literature searching needs a FAIR revolution
The volume of academic research articles is increasing exponentially. However, the ease with which we are able to find these articles depends on the capabilities of the search systems that we use. These systems (bibliographic databases like Scopus and academic search engines like Google Scholar) act as important gatekeepers between authors and readers. A recent … Continued
2019 In Review: Research Tools & Tech
Digital technologies continue to reshape and reimagine core research practices, from transcribing interviews, to creating entire texts autonomously. This list brings together some of the top posts on research technologies that have featured on the LSE Impact Blog in 2019. Disrupting transcription – How automation is transforming a foundational research method The transcription of verbal and non-verbal social interactions is […]
Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: Which is best for me?
Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project. For social scientists this process is increasingly likely to take place on Google Scholar, closely followed by traditional scholarly databases. In this post, Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea , Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado-López-Cózar, analyse the relative coverage of the three main research databases, […]
Should we use AI to make us quicker and more efficient researchers?
Paper Digest is a new research tool that uses artificial intelligence to produce summaries of research papers. In this post David Beer tests out this tool on his own research and reflects on what the increasing penetration of AI into cognition and research tells us about the current state of academic research. When you arrive at Paper Digest you are welcomed […]
Journal Indexing: Core standards and why they matter
The ways in which journals are indexed online is essential to how they can be searched for and found. Inclusion in certain indexes is also closely linked to quality assessment, with research funders often requiring their grantees to publish in outlets listed in certain indexes. In this post Danielle Padula explains the importance of good journal indexing and how journals […]
Book Review: The Joy of Search
In this repost, Jill O’Neil reviews Daniel M. Russell’s The Joy of Search: A google insiders guide to going beyond the basics. Finding the book to offer a lively means of helping users to develop the thinking skills needed in strategically approaching available tools for solving an information problem. At ALA this year, I had the happy experience of sitting down in the […]
The death of the literature review and the rise of the dynamic knowledge map
Almost every academic article starts with a literature review. However, although these short research summaries can be beneficial, as discussed in previous posts on the LSE Impact Blog, they also introduce opportunities for unverifiable misrepresentation and self-aggrandizement. In this post Gorgi Krlev proposes that short of abolishing them, or aiming for complete standardization of literature reviews, researchers in the social […]
Introducing the Observatory of International Research: A simple research discovery tool for everyone
Andreas Pacher presents the Observatory of International Research (OOIR), a research tool that provides users with easy to use overviews and information for whole fields of social science research. Reflecting on the advantages and limitations of other discovery tools and the potential for information overload, Andreas points to the utility of OOIR in producing search results that are both broad […]