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The Research Blog wins a GOLD Heist award!

Last week the BU Research Blog won a prestigious Gold Heist Award in the Best Internal Communication Campaign category at a glittering awards ceremony in Leeds. HURRAY! 😀

The Best Internal Communication Campaign category examines awareness campaigns aimed at staff, students or both. Judges were looking for a project with the purpose of improving internal knowledge, awareness and engagement. There were 10 institutions short-listed in the category.

The judges commented that the Research Blog was a innovative within the sector and a ‘great way to motivate and engage with staff, bringing a sense of community’.

The Heist Awards have grown continually over the past 20 years to become the premier awards programme for Education Marketing within further and higher educaton and its aim is to recognise and celebrate professionalism and innovation in the sector.

Thank you to everyone who contributes to the Research Blog by subscribing to the daily digest, adding posts, alerting us to news stories, adding comments, etc, and also to CEMP for designing and maintaining the Blog.

Increasing publication impact – Using social media, e.g. Twitter, blogs, YouTube, social networking, etc.

Guidance

Twitter – Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as ‘tweets’. Academics are increasingly promoting their research papers via Twitter, which are then picked up by other researchers and practitioners. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Twitter allows you to set up search terms to enable you to monitor what is being talked about in your areas of interest. You can then comment on the relevant conversations. The more you engage, the more people will follow you to listen to your comments and recommendations. As followers come to you, rather than you approaching them, Twitter is an ideal way to reach new audiences.

Research indicates that highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles. Top-cited articles can be predicted from top-tweeted articles, with 93% specificity and 75% sensitivity (Eysenbach, 2011).

There are some excellent guides available on how to use Twitter for research projects, such as:

SAGE’s guidelines for how to use Twitter are available here: http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdfs/twitterguidelines.pdf

BU guidelines on how to use Twitter are available here: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2012/01/19/get-tweeting-using-twitter-for-research-projects/

LSE Impact of Social Sciences guidelines on using Twitter are available here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/

Paul Hughes from our M&C department is currently offering workshops to BU academics on how to get started with Twitter – read more here: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2012/05/16/twitter-for-research-academics/

 

Blogs – Academics who blog about their research regularly report positive outcomes, such as networking and collaboration, finding new audiences and opportunities, disseminating research more widely, increasing citations and downloads, and building reputation. Bloggers argue that far from diluting scholarly success (as has been suggested by some academics), online writing can be a serious tool for academic practice. Blogging should be seen as part of a programme of dissemination and collaboration, and is best used alongside traditional academic outlets (such as journals) as a means of amplifying the reach, and potentially the significance and future direction, of the research. Research indicates that blogging about a research paper causes a large increase in the number of abstract views and downloads in the same month (McKenzie and Ozler, 2011).

Rather than setting up a personal blog, BU academics can add posts about their research to the BU Research Blog. The BU Research Blog is visible to a global audience and is searchable by search engines, such as Google. Good post topics could include:

  • Your area of research and papers that you have published – and/or other related papers in your field of research. Link to the full-text article/DOI for maximum impact.
  • Conferences and training events that you’re due to speak at.
  • Your last conference – were there any interesting questions that came up?
  • Your opinions about any recent press coverage of your subject area.
  • You can also ask your colleagues and co-researchers to add posts to the Blog and comment on your own posts to stimulate debate.

 All staff at BU can have access to add their own posts to the Research Blog. Just email me and I will set you up with access.

 

YouTube – Visual content accessed on sites such as YouTube is increasingly popular, particularly with students. The publisher Sage reports seeing an increasing amount of traffic to their journal sites via YouTube as students use video as an initial way of researching a topic. Many publishers are now embracing YouTube, for example the Sage YouTube channel is a collection of videos, primarily by academics, about Sage journal articles. BU has a YouTube channel and M&C are able to film short videos of academics discussing their research. These videos can then be used in multiple places to maximise impact. Watch Alan Fyall’s video below as an example:

httpv://youtu.be/RvR3fFDrTLQ

 

Join academic social networking sites – Academics are increasingly using social networking sites to meet and converse with people who share similar research interests. Examples include: MyNetResearch, Academia and Academici. On these sites you can see what other people are discussing and what issues are pertinent in your field of research. If you have undertaken research in these areas then you can contribute and share your research findings, which in turn should increase the citations/downloads of your work.

Blogs and wikis now available to BU staff

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The “Collaboration Tools for Academics” project has been looking into the variety of writing tools that BU currently provides to staff. A shared writing tool, also known as a blog or a wiki, is a system for posting, editing, and managing a collection of hypertext pages, generally pertaining to a certain topic or purpose.  A Blog is displayed as a set of pages in time order (like the BU Research Blog!), while a Wiki is displayed as a set of linked pages (such as Wikipedia).

There are currently a number of these technologies being used within the University and one of the key distinctions is between those that are internally facing and those that are external.

Internal blogs and wikis are currently available through myBU and externally available blogs which are best described as microsites are managed by M&C who have a responsibility for how BU appears to the outside world.

The project has helped develop sufficient tutorial guidance to allow staff to decide which kind of tool they require and they will now be able to request access to the service.

To access information about blogs and wikis at BU follow these steps:

  1.  Access SNOW via: https://bournemouth.service-now.com/navpage.do
  2. Click on: Raise a Request or Incident on the left menu
  3. Click on: Blogs, Wikis and Mircosites on the right menu
  4. To request one of these services log a job via the SNOW system

If you have any questions regarding the service then please use the contact details specified within the SNOW page you are directed to.

Please note that you can also gain access to the SNOW page through the Staff Intranet.

BU Research Blog is short-listed for a national award!

Hurray! The BU Research Blog has been short-listed for a Heist Award in the Best Internal Communication Campaign category. The Heist Awards have evolved over the last 20 years to become the premier awards programme for marketing in the sector and exist to recognise and celebrate professionalism and innovation in education marketing.

The Best Internal Communication Campaign category is for awareness campaigns aimed at staff, students or both and the judges are looking for a project with the purpose of improving internal knowledge, awareness and engagement.

Just to get short listed is a great achievement so thank you to everyone who contributes to and reads the Research Blog and who has made it a success.

The awards event will take place on Thursday 31 May in Leeds. Fingers crossed we win! 😀

 

Happy 1st Birthday BU Research Blog!

It is exactly one year today since the Research Blog was launched at Bournemouth University!

Our first post was on the excellent RNLI slipways research undertaken in DEC by Prof Mark Hadfield and Dr Ben Thomas (read the story here). Since then there have been 957 posts added to the Blog, many of which were posted by academic colleagues from across BU. The Blog currently has 366 subscribers to the Daily Digest email.

To celebrate we’re inviting all staff at BU to get more involved with the Blog to make it more exciting, interactive, collaborative and beneficial to academic staff. There are a number of ways you can get involved:

  • To subscribe to the Blog to receive the daily digest emails; this is the best way to keep up to date with research and knowledge exchange information at BU. Find out more here: Subscribe to the Blog!
  • To comment on Blog posts to share further information, resources, and perspectives, and to make connections with your colleagues. Find out more here: Interact with the Blog!
  • To add posts to the Blog to share information, experiences, successes, advice, news, etc with colleagues, and to promote your research both internally and externally. We’re strongly encouraging all staff involved in research at BU to sign up for access to add posts to the Blog and to start blogging! Using the Blog is really easy – you need no prior knowledge of blogs or websites, just an interest in research. Contact Susan Dowdleif you’d like to be set up with access to add posts.
  • To share Blog posts, either via Facebook, Twitter or email. Find out more here: Share posts from the Blog!

The Research Blog is unique in the sector and in its first year of existence it has been a huge success in improving research communications at BU.

Be part of something cool and get more involved in the Blog! :)

Happy 1 year birthday, Research Blog!

 

The Blog is 10 months old! Celebrate by finding out how you can get involved!

Guidance

To celebrate the Blog’s birthday we’re inviting all staff at BU who have an interest in Research to get more involved with the Blog to make it more exciting, interactive, collaborative and beneficial to academic staff. There are a number of ways you can get involved:

  • To subscribe to the Blog to receive the daily digest emails; this is the best way to keep up to date with research and knowledge exchange information at BU. Find out more here: Subscribe to the Blog!
  • To comment on Blog posts to share further information, resources, and perspectives, and to make connections with your colleagues. Find out more here: Interact with the Blog!
  • To add posts to the Blog to share information, experiences, successes, advice, news, etc with colleagues, and to promote your research both internally and externally. We’re strongly encouraging all staff involved in research at BU to sign up for access to add posts to the Blog and to start blogging! Using the Blog is really easy – you need no prior knowledge of blogs or websites, just an interest in research. Contact Susan Dowdle if you’d like to be set up with access to add posts.
  • To share Blog posts, either via Facebook, Twitter or email. Find out more here: Share posts from the Blog!

The Research Blog is unique in the sector and in its first ten months of existence it has been a huge success in improving research communications at BU. Be part of something cool and get more involved in the Blog! 🙂

Happy 10 month birthday, Research Blog!

Share posts from the Blog!

Guidance

If you’d like to share any of the posts on the Blog with colleagues, friends, the public, you can do this quickly and easily via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email (plus many more!) using the Share This function at the end of each Blog post.

Simply:

  1. Click on ‘Click here to share this blog post’ at the end of the post you wish to share
  2. This will open the post in your browser, giving you the option to share the post via Twitter, Email or Facebook (as per the picture below)
  3. To share via Twitter or Facebook simply click on the icon and the post will be added to your Twitter feed / Facebook profile
  4. To share via any other media (such as email, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Delicious, etc) simply hover the cursor over the Email icon and a new window will open displaying all of the ways you can share the post. Clicking on LinkedIn, for example, will share it via LinkedIn! Easy 🙂

Sharing posts this way helps to promote the excellent work going on at BU and can also help you to establish networks with likeminded people.

                                  

The blog has been accessed by over 16,000 unique visitors in 4 months!

Wow! We’ve been monitoring engagement with the blog now for four months using the fabulous Google Analytics tool. The stats below are based on the period 25 July to 29 November 2011 (128 days).

On average during this period the blog received 16,017 unique visitors, each spending approximately 1.42 minutes on the site. The blog is generally much busier on weekdays attracting between 250 and 500 unique visitors each day. In total there have been over 40,000 page views.

53% of visitors find us via internet search engines. The top search terms led readers to our blog over the past four months are:

  • culture
  • transport
  • innovation
  • santander
  • ocean waves
  • security
  • ocean
  • bournemouth
  • graphene
  • racism
  • human rights
  • bournemouth university research blog
  • health
  • humanities
  • poverty
  • ict
  • bu research blog
  • bu logo
  • hefce ref training events
  • bu

37% of visitors are direct traffic, i.e. via the web address, the BU Staff Portal, or the Daily Digest email. This is excellent as it shows that you lovely people who work at Bournemouth University are using the blog – hooray!

10% of visitors are referred to our blog by external sites. Our top referring sites are:

At present 32% of visits to the blog are made by returning visitors and 68% are made by new visitors.

Our visitors to date have come from 142 different countries (see the map below). The top ten countries viewing the blog are:

  • UK
  • USA
  • India
  • Spain
  • Germany
  • Belgium
  • France
  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Greece

Within the UK most visitors are based in:

  • Bournemouth
  • London
  • Poole
  • Southampton
  • Bristol
  • Leeds
  • Manchester
  • Edinburgh
  • Nottingham
  • Birmingham

Our 10 most accessed pages to date are:

This is all excellent news 🙂 We’re always open to receiving feedback about the blog – please email us at any time with any comments, suggestions, etc, or add a comment to this blog post.

If you would like access to add your own stories and posts to the blog then email me (jnortham@bournemouth.ac.uk) and I’ll get you started!

We last reviewed the visitor stats on the Blog in August – you can read that previous post here: Does Anybody Read this Blog? Yes!

Viewing the snazzy pictures on the Daily Digest email!

Guidance

Subscribers to the Blog may have noticed this week that the pictures no longer appear automatically on the snazzy Daily Digest email 🙂

If you have received the Daily Digest email but cannot see all of the images then you may need to unblock image downloads from the Blog. To do this follow these  simple steps:

1. Open the Daily Digest email

2. Click the infobar at the top of the message, and then click ‘Add Sender to the Safe Senders List’ (as per the picture below)

3. Marvel at the beauty of all future Daily Digests which should make accessing current research information at BU a doddle 😀

The Daily Digest is sent to all Blog subscribers every day at 10am and provides an easy to read overview of all of the posts added to the Blog in the past 24 hours.

For details on how to subscribe to the Blog read our previous blog post on subscribing.

Our snazzy new blog!

Guidance

Welcome to the launch of our snazzy new look BU Research Blog, designed for us by the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) in the Media School! The redesign was to make the blog look more professional and easier to navigate. In the seven months the blog has been running we’ve had over 600 posts, including regular posts by the PVC and the Deputy Deans. Because of the number of posts we’ve generated, it is often easy to miss out on some of the content so the redesign should hopefully make it easier to browse previous content and find related information about R&KE activities at BU.

In addition to the main research blog, there are several other important sections to the blog:

  • EU Research Blog – your one stop shop for everything to do with EU research funding!
  • PG Research Blog – news and information for postgraduate research students and supervisors at BU.
  • Research Themes – keep up to date with current developments with the emerging 8 BU research themes. Each theme has its own section of the blog and we encourage all academics to contribute to discussions around the themes.
  • R&KEO Contacts – information (including contact details) for all staff members in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Office so you know who we are!
  • Events – a calendar of all research and knowledge exchange events, both internal and external.
  • Researcher Toolkit – information about BU-endorsed systems, methods and policies that you may need when undertaking research at BU.

Email subscribers to the blog will continue to receive the Daily Digest email every morning at 10am.

The blog is owned by everyone at BU with an interest in research and knowledge exchange. If you would like access to add your own posts to the blog then contact Susan Dowdle and she will set you up with access and get you blogging in no time 🙂

We’re always open to feedback about the blog so if you have any comments about the redesign (or any other aspect of the blog) then please let us know!

ARMS conference 2011

Corrina and I are finally back from the land down under after attending the excellent Australasian Research Management Society conference in Sydney in September. The conference theme this year was Transformation and we presented a session on the work we have done with business partnering techniques to transform research culture at BU. We also presented a poster about the fabulous BU Research Blog!

Both of our presentations went well and we received good feedback from other delegates. On the back of our sessions we have made some good contacts with peers at Australasian universities, some of whom have also subscribed to the blog.

In addition we also attended a number of other sessions which were extremely useful and informative. We will be adding posts to the blog about these sessions in due course.

We used the amazing Prezi for our presentation and you can access our slides by clicking on the blue image:

To watch the slide show simply click on ‘more’, then ‘full screen’, then use the arrow to pan through the slides.

If you are not familiar with Prezi, it is a cloud-based presentation software application that is free to use and which creates much more exciting presentations than simply using PowerPoint. You can access Prezi at: www.prezi.com.

In addition to the workshop presentation we also presented a poster about the blog for which we won 2nd prize in the poster competition. You can access a copy of our poster here:

 

Does anybody read this blog?! YES!!!!

Guidance

On Friday Steve Calver ended his latest MRG post with a question: “Does anybody read this blog?” – and within an hour a reader from another university replied to say “I do!“. Which is great! So I thought I’d share some of the visitor stats so you can get an idea of who views the blog and how regularly.

We measure footfall on the blog using the fabulous Google Analytics. The stats below are based on a period of 18 days during July and August 2011.

On average during this period the blog received 166 unique visitors every day, each spending approximately 2 minutes on the site.

51% of visitors find us via internet search engines. The top search terms led readers to our blog over the past 18 days are:

  • bournemouth
  • innovation
  • bu research blog
  • bournemouth university research blog
  • security
  • digital hub bournemouth university blog
  • ict
  • health
  • hefce ref training information events
  • marie curie fellowship 2011
  • kip jones rufus stone
  • bournemouth research blog
  • transport
  • bu logo
  • racism
  • bournemouth uk
  • culture
  • eurostat
  • statistics
  • wow effect

41% direct traffic, i.e. via the web address or via the BU Staff Portal. This is excellent as it shows that you lovely people who work at Bournemouth University are using the blog – hooray!

8% of visitors are referred to our blog by external sites. Our top referring sites are:

The bottom two are interesting referrals as these are universities in the USA that have picked up on our new BU Open Access Publication Fund and promoted the idea via their own websites. This has then encouraged visitors to these sites to visit our blog.

At present 30% of visits to the blog are made by returning visitors and 70% are made by new visitors.

Our visitors to date have come from 91 different countries (as displayed in the map below). The top ten countries viewing the blog are:

  • UK
  • USA
  • Germany
  • Spain
  • India
  • France
  • Poland
  • Canada
  • Belgium
  • Italy

So why is all of this information important?

Because it shows us two important things:

1. That the blog is working internally as the main means of sharing research news and information!

2. That the blog is working externally to promote the excellent research undertaken at BU!

We’re always seeking to improve things so if you have your own webpages/blogs then please feel free to use them to promote the BU Research Blog or ask us to link to your webpages/blogs from this blog, and if you have any ideas on how to improve our blog and/or to increase readership then please let us know! 🙂

The Wellcome Trust has a blog!

The Wellcome Trust has an excellent blog which you can access here: http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com

The blog provides a place where researchers can share stories about the research funded by the Wellcome Trust. Over the past few months blog posts have been added about a huge variety of research projects covering everything from the neuroscience of language and masculinity and madness in the Victorian age to stem cells and drug screening and brain imaging.

Why not check it out and read about the excellent research being undertaken! As with our Research Blog you can choose to subscribe to receive regular email updates. There is a subscribe box on the right hand side of the home page.

First BU Research Blog Poll Results

Are journal impact factors a good indicator of quality?

Following the launch of the first BU Research Blog Poll, we received 28 responses to the above question which were split as follows:

Yes – always 2
Yes – but in STEM disciplines only 1
Sometimes 22
No, never 2

The majority of responses indicate that there may be some doubt about the usefulness of impact factors when used as a proxy for journal quality. This is perhaps because there are a number of factors that could affect a journal’s perceived quality that cannot be demonstrated through metrics alone. Also, the use of journal metrics like impact factors are not necessarily perceived as being robust enough yet to give an accurate indication of journal or article quality, hence HEFCE’s decision not to rely solely on metrics in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

To continue the debate on this, do feel free to post a reply below, or suggest a topic for a future poll by responding to Julie’s original post. For more information about journal impact factors, have a look at the previous blog post on this subject.

In the meantime, why not get involved in the current poll which can be accessed from the top right-hand side of the blog homepage – it will take just seconds to complete and will help shape the support offered to BU academics in the future.

Like our posts? Then share them on Twitter!

Guidance

If you’d like to share any of the posts on the Blog with networks, colleagues, friends, the public, you can now do this quickly and easily on Twitter via our new TweetMeme plugin.

If you have a Twitter account then you can share a post by simply clicking on the TweetMeme logo (like the one on the left). The TweetMeme logo is found at the end of every blog post. This will retweet the story via your Twitter account.

Sharing posts via Twitter helps to promote the excellent work going on at BU and can also help you to establish networks with likeminded people.

This is in addition to the ‘Like’ functionality via Facebook that we have had available on the Blog for a couple of months now.

 

 

Like our posts? Then let us know!

Guidance

We’re interested to know what you like about the blog, which posts you find useful and what you’d like to see more of.

The best way to do this is by commenting on the blog posts (see our previous post on how to do this).

As of today you can also like individual blog posts using our newly installed Facebook like plugin.

If you like a blog post and have a Facebook account then simply click on the like icon at the start or end of the post.

This will enable us to do more of the posts you like and find useful 🙂