Getting Started
Information Gathering
Keeping up to Date
It is crucial to keep up to date with current developments in your field of research. This may be achieved by setting up alert services and RSS feeds with relevant journals and databases, attending conferences, subscribing to blogs and joining discussion lists.
Evaluating Your Material
One of the core skills in the research process is the evaluation of material retrieved.
Managing Your Information
A critical component of successful research is the recording of literature searched, read and reviewed.
RefWorks
and
EndNote
are bibliographic management systems designed to assist with this task
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce such as trademarks and patents.
- A patent is a right granted for any device, substance, method or process which is new, inventive and useful. Patent searching is critical to determine if an idea is original prior to embarking on the patenting process.
- Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own and is illegal. It can be avoided by referencing all your sources correctly.
- Turnitin is a text matching system designed to assist students to avoid plagiarism.
- Copyright is legislation that protects and governs the use of copyright material created by others.
Section 3, Part A of the UWS Intellectual Property Policy provides guidance for UWS staff on the ownership of copyright when scholarly works, creative works, commissioned works and or course materials are created by staff members in the course of employment.
Section 3, Part B of the UWS Intellectual Property Policy provides guidance for UWS students on the ownership of copyright when a thesis, academic paper and or research project material are created by UWS students.
The Oak Law Project provides useful advice for students on copyright.
The Australian Copyright Council Online Information Centre provides useful copyright information sheets for students on: Creative Commons licences, Quotes & extracts: copyright obligations, Research or study and Fair dealing.
For assistance please contact the UWS Copyright Officer.
Collaboration
Researchers often collaborate with colleagues from other institutions state wide, nationally and internationally.
RefShare is a tool designed to assist in this process.
Research Impact
Measuring research impact is important for many reasons including funding and employment/promotion applications. Methods used to measure impact include:
- Citation tracking involves searching for documents that have referenced a particular work to determine the relative importance of the work within the field.
- Journal impact involves determining the merit of a journal within a subject field as indicated by citation analysis.
- Libcitations which considers the international library holdings of a book as a measure of its importance.
- The h-index utilises citation tracking to formulate a "whole of career" measure of research impact.
- The Eigenfactor score uses data from Journal Citation Reports to measure a journal's total importance in a field of research by correcting for differences across disciplines and journals.
- Science performance statistics and trends as indicated by Essential Science Indicators
Getting Published
Further Assistance
Feedback
The Library welcomes your comments and suggestions
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