In recognition of the important contribution that early career academics play in driving research for the future, we are delighted to continue the BU Academic Targeted Research scheme to attract and recruit talented individuals in targeted research areas. Following the successful recruitment of five new posts, we will employ one other new Senior Lecturer with significant postdoctoral expertise (or of comparable experience) with outstanding potential in alignment with the targeted research areas:
Health and Science Communication
We wish to recruit a diverse cohort of individuals with the motivation to become future academic leaders in their field. As an academic at BU, successful candidates will develop their career in exciting work environments, be provided with a high level of dedicated time to drive research activity and build capacity, and have the freedom to develop their research interests within the targeted areas. BU is committed to Fusion and as such successful candidates will also have the opportunity to contribute to the education and professional practice activities within their Department.
To support these roles and accelerate their careers, BU will provide three years of full-time salary (or part-time equivalent) and reasonable costs directly related to the proposed programme of research activities (up to £10k per year). The standard Academic Application Form must be completed and in all cases accompanied by the BU Academic Targeted Research scheme application form, which will propose the research activities and request funding.
To find out more about these exciting opportunities, please read the scheme guidance and visit the BU website.
The deadline for applications for the final post is Sunday 10 May 2020.
Purpose-Solo travel for leisure and business is increasing. It is therefore timely to conduct research into the experiences of solo tourists. This paper aims to explore one aspect of the solo tourist experience that can be challenging, that of dining alone. This topic has received little attention in the tourism or hospitality literature. Design/methodology/approach-A qualitative approach was adopted and narrative inquiry was selected as the optimum route to obtain detailed and rich accounts of the experiences of solo diners. In-depth interviews of 27 solo tourists were conducted with varying socio-demographic characteristics.
Findings-This study shows that though travelling alone is prized by participants, dining alone, especially in the evening, is often discomfiting. Discomfort is caused by the perceived negative judgement of others and is mitigated by the use of various props such as books and mobile phones. A research agenda is put forward on the aspects of the solo tourist/diner experience.
Practical implications-The paper concludes by asking what can be done to ameliorate the solo dining experience and provides some recommendations to hospitality operators to support this market and improve competitiveness and profitability. The paper shows that inclusive environments can attract multiple market segments and agile restaurants can develop both solo and plural dining experiences.
Originality/value-This paper addresses a topic that has received limited scholarly attention as well as industry engagement despite the growth in solo travel.
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) board has approved four new POSTnotes on:
AI and healthcare
Developments in vaccine technologies
Distance learning
Regulating product sustainability
Work on these will be starting in the following months. They are looking for experts to contribute their insights, literature or as external reviewers. For more information on what contributing to a POSTnote entails, click here. And if you’d like to receive updates about POST’s work directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the monthly newsletter here.
POST also has two new resources to give you all the information you need on engaging effectively with Parliament:
Webpage on researcher engagement with Parliament around COVID-19 and its impacts
If you want to know where the opportunities to engage with policymakers lie, go to: Engaging with Parliament as a researcher around COVID-19 and its impacts. It contains details of the Expert Database, which some of you have signed up to, and up-to-date details of all select committee inquiries relating to COVID-19. If any new opportunities come up, this page is where to find them.
A short guide to producing research to support the work of UK Parliament
Some of you may already be drafting project proposals for research relating to COVID-19 and its impacts. If you want help and guidance on how this can translate to policy impact, POST has also produced this guide. It gives an overview on what Parliament is and does, how it uses research, KE mechanisms, and a page of tips on shaping proposals and what to do when conducting research and disseminating findings.
Every BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise. The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.
Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to Research Professional. These can be downloaded here.
Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.
User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using Research Professional.
Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.
In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of Research Professional. To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional
Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on Research Professional. They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with Research Professional. The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat. Each session will cover:
Self registration and logging in
Building searches
Setting personalised alerts
Saving and bookmarking items
Subscribing to news alerts
Configuring your personal profile
Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month. You can register here for your preferred date:
These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.
Have you noticed the pink box on the BU Research Blog homepage?
By clicking on this box, on the left of the Research Blog home page just under the text ‘Funding Opportunities‘, you access a Research Professional real-time search of the calls announced by the Major UK Funders. Use this feature to stay up to date with funding calls. Please note that you will have to be on campus or connecting to your desktop via our VPN to fully access this service.
In late March, the BBC launched Culture In Quarantine across television, radio and online, to give the nation access to the arts at a time when it needs it the most. Providing extraordinary access to shuttered exhibitions, performances and museums, a virtual book festival and much more.
This week, Culture In Quarantine turns its attention to our museums and art galleries and the arts and humanities research community are asked to get involved!
MuseumFromHome is a whole day of broadcast and social media activity on Thursday 30 April. This includes an exhibition on the Clash (marking the 40th anniversary of London Calling) at the Museum of London. The BBC is welcoming people to get involved on social media platforms using the hashtag #MuseumFromHome. They intend to post as much as they can and want people to get involved sharing material using the #MuseumFromHome hashtag.
Please get involved by sharing public-friendly outputs from your research projects that have a connection to museums and galleries. Think about including visual assets, such as imagery and video, or linking to public-friendly resources.
Please include the following hashtags and handles, so that you have the best chance of your content being shared or reposted by the BBC and the AHRC:
Do you have a great digital asset which could be published on BBC Culture in Quarantine? If so, please contact the engagement team at the AHRC via engage@ahrc.ukri.org who are working to supply AHRC-funded research content to the BBC.
The British Library is planning a series of upcoming webinars which you may find useful and interesting –
How to access digital resources: a free webinar for researchers Friday 1st May, 10.30-11.30am Researchers working from home may find now, more than ever, that they cannot access all they need to do their research. This webinar will introduce the concept of open access, and the various tools and resources that enable access to the resources researchers need.
**This will be of particular interest to researchers, so it’d be great if you could circulate locally to your researchers. It will also serve as a general intro to OA for any colleagues wishing to learn about this area of research support.** Details and sign-up here:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4784745156984703756
The British Library’s Shared Research Repository Thursday 7th May, 2.30-3.30pm Creative and cultural organisations require repositories that look good, are attractive to users and support a wide range of non-text research outputs. Join us to learn more about our shared repository for UK cultural heritage organisations. Details and sign-up here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5003834943448442636
Introduction to research data, data services and DataCite at the British Library (and beyond) Thursday 14th May, 2.30-3.30pm This webinar will provide an introduction to research data and how to use persistent identifiers such as DOIs to make research data and other digital outputs like theses and grey literature findable and citable online. This webinar will also provide an introduction to DataCite, an international non-profit organisation, which enables the ability to create DOIs for digital objects. Details and sign-up here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6958681955238901260
Introduction to EThOS: the British Library database of UK theses Thursday 21st May, 2.30-3.30pm The British Library service known as EThOS is effectively a shop window on the amazing doctoral research undertaken in UK universities. With half a million thesis titles listed, you can uncover unique research on every topic imaginable and often download the full thesis file to use immediately for your own research. This webinar will offer a guided walk through the features and content of EThOS, and the research potential for making use of EThOS as a dataset.
**This webinar will be of interest to doctoral students and researchers, so please do advertise locally. It will also be of interest to librarians wishing to learn more about how EThOS works**. Details and sign-up here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1072813692823727372
Project FREYA: How persistent identifiers can connect research together Thursday 28th May, 2.30-3.30pm This webinar will showcase the latest developments from the EC-funded FREYA project, including the PID Graph which provides a method to discover the relationships between different researchers and their organisations and find out the full impact of research outputs. It will also describe upcoming developments planned in the final year of the project such as a Common DOI Search. Details and sign-up here:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6895938324199891724
Please join the British Library for as many of these as you can. They will all last approximately 25-30 minutes with time for questions.
As we continue working remotely, UKCGE thought you may appreciate the opportunity to hear from, and put your questions to, experienced research supervisors and an academic developer sharing effective practices in research supervision at a distance.
Kelsie Fletcher, PhD student in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences with this poster entitled:
‘The momentum of grounded theory: Nursing research and new perspectives in disaster management’.
Click the poster below to enlarge.
The purpose of this poster is to explore the background of Grounded Theory evolution to its application in disaster management and nursing theoretical development. It will examine why Grounded theory remains popular and useful in developing professional knowledge in healthcare research and, most importantly, why it is the methodology of choice for understanding the experiences of nurses working in a disaster region. Explicit links will be made to offer clarity of its appropriateness in this field of research and this will be enhanced by reflections of the researcher. Nurses possess a unique opportunity to develop understanding of emergency management, public health and planning, to enhance potential responses to a disaster. Grounded theory aims to support research in subjects with little or no literature available (Charmaz 2014; Birks and Mills 2015). Due to the researcher’s personal experience in disaster management provision, constructivist grounded theory is considered to be the most appropriate.
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is inviting proposals for public engagement with environmental science which understand, address or mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak.
NERC intends to fund projects costing up to £10,000 each with a total budget of £50,000.
Proposal deadline: The closing date for proposals is 16:00 Wednesday 13 May, 2020 via email.
Successful projects must be completed by 31 March 2021.
Alternatively please contact Adam Morris (BU Engagement Officer) or Genna Del Rosa (BU Engagement And Impact Facilitator) at publicengagement@bournemouth.ac.uk
What do you do when you feel anxious about an upcoming interview or angry about a friend’s unfair comment on your behaviour? You might take a few deep breaths and try to view the situation from a different perspective: it’s just an interview, not a matter of life and death. And, on calmer reflection, your friend may be right – you did react a bit strongly.
Alternatively, you may bury your feelings in a tub of ice cream. The latter is called emotional eating and some people use it to regulate their emotions.
But not everyone turns to unhealthy eating to regulate unpleasant emotions. Our latest research, published in the Journal of Eating Disorders, suggests that some people actually eat healthily to do so. You might wonder what’s wrong with drinking a GM-free raw vegetable smoothie. Surely it can’t harm you? And for most people, it is harmless. But eating healthy food can become an unhealthy obsession called orthorexia nervosa.
Pathological obsession
Orthorexia nervosa is a term coined by Steven Bratman in 1997, from the Ancient Greek “ortho” meaning right and “orexia” meaning appetite, to describe a fixation on healthy eating. As such, orthorexia nervosa has also been referred to as “clean eating”, although the term orthorexia nervosa suggests a pathological obsession, rather than yet another fad diet.
Because healthy eating and healthy lifestyles are generally considered desirable, it can be difficult to spot when healthy eating becomes an unhealthy obsession. But an obsession with healthy eating can be hard for your physical and mental health as well your relationships. It can cause arguments with family or friends over food choices and lead to social isolation.
While orthorexia nervosa is not yet a recognised diagnosis, it shares some similarities with other eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa. Research shows that people with eating disorders have trouble recognising and regulating their emotions, but this had never been shown in people with orthorexic tendencies, so this was the focus of our study.
Out of control
We recruited 196 people with an interest in healthy eating through Facebook (including 167 women in the UK with an average age of 28). We found that difficulties identifying and regulating emotions were associated with orthorexic tendencies. In particular, people with orthorexic tendencies were found to feel out of control when upset and to have difficulty knowing how to regulate their emotions. The participants in our study with orthorexic tendencies also had trouble identifying and accepting their emotional reactions.
People with orthorexic tendencies often struggled to regulate their emotions. GaudiLab/Shutterstock
Similar to a recently published study that looked at bloggers’ experiences of orthorexia nervosa, our findings suggest that people with orthorexic tendencies may use restrictive dietary rules around healthy eating to feel perfect and in control. They also use it to cope with difficult feelings, potentially because they feel they don’t have other ways to make themselves feel better.
While not everyone who eats healthily will have orthorexic tendencies, people who use obsessive and restrictive dietary rules to regulate unpleasant feelings may be at risk of developing orthorexia nervosa.
With around half of people on Instagram using it to share food experiences, the increased prevalence of fad diets, mixed information around what we should and should not eat, health guidelines, and even climate change, more and more people may decide to eat more healthily and control what they are eating. While this may all be for a good cause, we recommend people to be conscious of when their healthy obsession may become unhealthy.
As part of the Doctoral College Researcher Development Programme and our commitment to provide ongoing support to our Postgraduate Researchers numerous workshops scheduled for April-May will now be delivered virtually, with a huge thanks to our incredible facilitators.
If you were already booked to attend the face-to-face workshop you do not need to rebook, this has been automatically transferred to the online session.
Sessions include:
Research Data Management
Focus Groups
Developing a Search Strategy & Using Researcher Tools
Developing Research Networks and Collaborations
Managing my Research Project
Interviewing in Semi-Structured Interviews
EndNote for Managing References
Surveys & Questionnaires
Originality & Plagiarism
Details and booking links can be found on the new Virtual Workshops page of the RDP on Brightspace.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to get in touch. More sessions are also being planned.
Bournemouth University authors can now publish Open Access in more than 2,000 Wiley journals at no extra cost!
Jisc and Wiley, a global leader in research and education, have struck a four-year “read and publish” agreement that offers researchers at UK universities open access (OA) publishing in all Wiley journals at no cost to them.
As part of the new agreement, the proportion of OA articles published by UK researchers will increase from 27% to an estimated 85% in year one, with the potential to reach 100% by 2022. The agreement will also enable institutions and their users to access all of Wiley’s journals.
This ground-breaking agreement will enable institutions to control the costs of access and OA publishing. It will also support a simplified process for authors and their institutions, enabling compliance with funder mandates and Plan S.
The agreement begins in March 2020, and all participating Jisc member institutions and affiliated researchers are eligible. The contract has been made publicly available on 31 March 2020.
Just over a month ago, RDS created a static blog page to give advice to academics during Covid-19. This has rapidly grown and so to help you navigate through the information, there is now a main page and then links to the following sections for further information:
UK Funder news
International Funder (mainly European) news
Funding Development Team Guidance to applicants to external funding
Project Delivery Team Guidance for Principal Investigators (PIs) of Research and Knowledge Exchange Projects + Ethics Approval
Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021
Guidance for clinical researchers – amendments to existing projects
Please visit the main Covid-19 page for all your advice needs.
A large scale empirical and legal study on the Intellectual Property Implications of the Development of Industrial 3D Printing, funded by the European Commission and led by Professor Dinusha Mendis (FMC, Law and Co-Director CIPPM) has been published.
Ahead of the completion of the project and publication of the report, a final workshop was hosted in Brussels on 14 October 2019. The presentations from the workshop as well as the panel discussion, can be accessed here.
The project provides an overview of the past and current industrial applications of Additive Manufacturing (AM) and 3D printing in seven selected sectors (health, aerospace, automotive, consumer, energy, construction and tooling) whilst identifying potential challenges and opportunities in need of clarification. With the aim of enhancing the competitiveness of the AM sector in Europe, the Study makes policy recommendations in the field of intellectual property for businesses engaged in the AM and 3D printing field, and in the present context, is highly relevant for businesses and consumers working with 3D printers, in the fight against Covid-19.
The EC and EU member states have launched a new data-sharing platform ‘European Covid-19 Data Platform‘ to enhance coordination of the COVID-19 research. The aim of the COVID-19 Data Portal is to facilitate data sharing and analysis, and to accelerate coronavirus research. The Platform will consist of two connected components:
SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs, which will organise the flow of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak sequence data and provide comprehensive open data sharing for the European and global research communities;
COVID-19 Data Portal, which will bring together and continuously update relevant COVID-19 datasets and tools, will host sequence data sharing and will facilitate access to other SARS-CoV-2 resources.
Festus Adedoyin, PhD student in the Faculty of Management with this poster entitled:
‘Energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and tourist arrivals to small island economies dependent on tourism.’
Click the poster below to enlarge.
In less than two decades, the global tourism industry has overtaken the construction industry as one of the bigger polluters, accounting for up to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Consequently, research into the causal link between emissions and the tourism industry have increased significantly focusing extensively on top earners from the industry. However, few studies have thoroughly assessed this relationship for small island economies dependent on tourism. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the causal relationship between CO2 emissions, real GDP per capita, and the tourism industry. The long-run relationship is investigated using Pooled Mean Group ARDL Model. Prior to this, we conduct the Pedroni and Kao cointegration tests, the ADF-Fisher and Im, Perasan Shin unit root tests. We also examine causality using the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) Panel causality tests. Our study seeks to contribute to the energy-growth-tourism debate as well as the feedback mechanism among the variables.
Given current Government guidance on the pandemic response, a number of research projects will need to be conducted remotely. Below are a number of external help guides/guidance articles that aim to assist researchers with this new way of working.
Research should remain within the ethics approval that has been granted – if you need to make any changes as a result of COVID 19 (for example moving from face-to-face to remote interviewing) please email researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk if a member of staff or your supervisor if a student.
UKRI have created a website called: Coronavirus: the science explained. This lays out the evidence and the facts about the virus, the disease, the epidemic, and its control.
The website will be regularly updated with the latest science information behind the coronavirus outbreak.
BU staff can login below:
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