Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
To welcome back all PGRs at the start of the new academic year, join the Doctoral College team, your PGR colleagues and new PGRs for coffee and cake.
Date: Wednesday 4 October, 1pm – 2 pm.
Location: Talbot Campus, K103 Kimmeridge House
We look forward to seeing you!
Doctoral College Team
At Café Scientifique, you can explore the latest ideas in science and technology in a relaxed setting. Enjoy listening to a short talk before engaging in debate and discussion with our guest speaker and audience.
Barriers such as dams and weirs alter a river’s natural flow, severely affecting aquatic ecosystems and leading to a decrease in water quality. Researchers in Europe have been working to address this issue – with the goal of reconnecting 25,000km of rivers by 2030. However, with funding for long-term monitoring decreasing, how do they track the success of this rewilding process?
Join Bournemouth University’s Dr Demetra Andreou, an expert in environmental science on Tuesday 3 October to discover how citizen scientists might play a role in the collection of such vital long-term data.
This event will be held at The Black Cherry in Boscombe, Bournemouth. Although the talks start at 6:30pm, the café will be open early so we encourage you to arrive early for a drink and a bite to eat before the talk starts.
If you have any questions about this event, or you’re interested in getting involved with a future Café Sci event, please email the Public Engagement with Research Team: publicengagement@bournemouth.ac.uk
After many emails about predatory journals and conferences, today I received an email about a predatory academic prize. Over the years there have been many BU Research Blogs warning readers about predatory journals, for example in 2014, 2015, 2018, and in 2019, and also about fake conferences (e.g. in 2017). It was inevitable that fake academic prizes would be the next trick. The email announces that for US$ 225 the prize is mine! This development fits in with the many messages I have received about having ‘won’ prizes on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. 
Today’s predatory prize announcement is still very much in its infancy as scammers from the ‘Asia International Research Award 2023’ did not pick the greatest paper written in 2020 by the first author Dr Preeti Mahato, formerly in BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, and now Lecturer in Global Health at Royal Holloway , University of London. If they had wanted to make the award scam more believable they would have chosen the PloS one paper from her BU PhD work in Nepal [1]. Instead the announcement list a paper with much older data based on secondary analysis [2], not a bad paper, but not a winner either.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
References
Announcing a new “Research Café”: twice-monthly informal and open-format online sessions for all things research (including practice-related research), starting in October. These sessions are hosted and supported by BU academic staff members, for staff and research students.
The sessions are open to all—academic staff, student, professional support staff, ECRs, profs, whoever!
Each session will be a drop-in; no need to RSVP unless a special session has been announced. You can pop in for 5 minutes or the full hour, have your lunch and/or a cuppa, and talk about research at Bournemouth.
Where requested, we can set up dedicated sessions on topics of interest. Some suggested areas include (but are not limited to!):
Keep an eye out for calendar invitations; if you don’t receive an invitation and you’d like to, please contact Lyle at lskains at bournemouth.ac.uk.
The Research Cafe is hosted by Lyle Skains and sponsored by the Centre for Science, Health, and Data Communications Research.
|
The scheme has three rounds per year and so the session is also open to those interested in applying in future rounds. Professor Sam Goodman will be sharing his experience of being on Wellcome’s Early Career advisory group in Medical Humanities, and in reviewing applications for the ECR award. Professor Goodman has also successfully received funding from Wellcome. Please check eligibility for the scheme: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/schemes/early-career-awards Friday 22nd September 2023at Lansdowne Campus, from 11.00 – 12:00
To book a place on this workshop, please complete the Booking Form. For any information about the content of this session, please contact Kate Percival – Research Facilitator kpercival@bournemouth.ac.uk |
Congratulations to BU’s PhD student Mr. Md. Shafkat Hossain who has been selected by Bloomberg Philanthropies as one of the Emerging Leaders in Drowning Prevention programme. This programme has been designed to create a cohort of younger leaders to join national and international efforts to raise awareness and strengthen solutions and political commitment towards drowning. This programme is hosted by the Global Health Advocacy Incubator and provides a unique opportunity for people like Shafkat to develop leadership skills in drowning prevention, and be a part of a global community working to reduce drowning deaths. This first group of Emerging Leaders includes people from Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Uganda, United States and Vietnam. Each Emerging Leader will be expected to participate in monthly sessions, both online and in person. The programme includes funding for Shafkat to attend the World Conference on Drowning Prevention in Perth, Australia in December 2023 (wcdp2023.com/) and the World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion in Delhi, India in September 2024 (worldsafety2024.com/).
Shafkat’s PhD research focuses on aspects of the Human-Centred-Design element of the Sonamoni project. 
Bournemouth University and the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB) jointly lead research into the prevention of children drowning deaths in Bangladesh. The project, called ‘Sonamoni’, is being coordinated by BU in collaboration with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). We are working with CIPRB to reduce drownings among newly-mobile children, generally under two years old. This £1.6m project has been made possible thanks to a grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through their Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMWH
This information forms part of BU’s annual Higher Education – Business & Community Interaction survey and it is vital we provide a full and accurate picture of all our public engagement activity.
The form will stay open for you to add your activities until the end of Friday 29 September 2023
Which events do I need to report?If you’re not sure if your event is eligible for inclusion, the SharePoint site includes further details and guidance.
What data do I need to provide?
For the purposes of the HE-BCI survey, please record the following:
Without this specific data, we will not be able to include your event in the survey.
The site contains further guidance about eligible activities and a set of FAQs.
If you have any further questions about the HE-BCI return, please contact publicengagement@bournemouth.ac.uk.
It is always a pleasure to see your own paper in print. If all is properly organised at the publisher, the first time you see you paper as it will look in its final version when you receive the proof copy. It is the authors’ task to proofread this final copy and pick up any mistakes you may have made or the journal has made putting your word file into the journal’s layout. More and more journals now ask you to do the proofreading and editing online. The first message here is that proofreading is exact business and most certainly time consuming. Moreover, feeding back mistakes you may find in the proofs is not without its trials and tribulations.
Yesterday we received the proofs for a paper accepted by BMC Health Research Policy & Systems [1]. The BMC is part of the publisher Springer , and it uses an online proof system eProofing to which the authors get temporary access, to read and correct text. This system looks good online, but beware the online version you get to edit does not look the same as the version that will appear in print. The draft print version generated by eProofing has line numbers which don’t appear online when you are editing the proofs. So we had to write on the online system separately that we found a set of quotes glued together, as the system does not allow authors to change the lay-out (for obvious reasons). In this case, we had to write details like: “There needs to be a space after first quote line 421.” What might look okay in the eProofing version didn’t do so in the print version, where it was it is wrong. This is illustrated in the example picture below.
Last month we battled with the proofs of another BU paper forthcoming in the journal Women and Birth [2], which is part of Elsevier. Again, it has an online system for proofs. This system does not allow the authors to correct mistakes in in the line spacing. So we ended up writing to journal manager, not the editor, things like: “There is a very big gap between the end of section 3.7. and Overview of findings section – please could the text be rearranged to get rid of this big gap.” We also asked for a summary section to be kept on one page, not having an orphan two words on the next page, but that appeared to be too difficult a request. We think we a little flexibility, i.e. a human intervention the lay-out could have been improved. See illustration below with text as it appears in the current online-first version.
We like to stress our advice to set plenty of time aside to read and edit the proofs, and to send details instructions to the journal manager or editor about what needs changing. Changes include typos, grammar and style, but also lay-out of text and illustrations, boxes in the text, tables and figures. “It is also important to check tables and figures during the proof-reading as the formatting can often go astray during the typesetting process” as we highlighted by Sheppard and colleagues [3]. Also double check correct spelling of names of co-authors and the final author order in the proofs. Many years ago, I received the proof of pages of a midwifery article [4].
I dutifully read and edited the proof of the actual text, but I never check the short introduction with the authors’ names which an editor had added to the final proofs. When the paper came out in print to transpired that this editor has changed the author order, i.e. my name was first, probably because I had submitted the paper on behalf of my co-author. This cause some problems with my co-author, made all the worse since I am married to her.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
References:
This half day course is an introduction to PPI and will:
1. Define PPI and why it matters
2. Explore the links between PPI and health equity
3. Explain how to deliver PPI and support those involved
It will be an interactive session, including input from someone with lived experience, talking about their involvement in research.
It will be delivered by Sue Bickler from the Involving People team at Help and Care, an organisation that ‘helps people and communities live the lives they choose’.
Sue has worked in the voluntary sector, local authorities, and health, and has substantial experience engaging with people and communities to ensure that services meet their needs. Her current role brings together the four Healthwatch in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (HIOW), ensuring that patient voice is central to decision making in the HIOW Integrated Care System and that people are equipped to support effective Patient and Public Involvement (PPI).
The session is funded by Clinical Research Network Wessex and is open to all health and care researchers working in Wessex including public contributors and community organisations.
Book your place here. A link to the online training will then be sent to you.
The Health Research Authority (HRA) has launched new Quality Standards to improve information given to people who are invited to take part in research. The Quality Standards have been launched alongside Design and Review Principles, which show researchers and Research Ethics Committees (REC) what the important ethical considerations are for participant information.
The Quality Standards and Design and Review Principles will be phased in from autumn 2023. As study materials are prepared in advance, REC reviews of participant information will initially be presented to research organisations as recommendations as opposed to actions required for approval.
From December 2023, the Quality Standards and Design and Review principles will become mandatory and will be applied to all research applications submitted for review.
Changes to participant information are currently the most likely reason for ethics committees to give a provisional opinion. Using this guidance will increase the possibility of receiving a favourable opinion.
Remember that BU has Participant Information Sheet templates that provide much of the required wording to ensure your participants are making a fully informed decision before agreeing to participate.
It is vital that when compiling your information sheets that you remember to include the HRA GDPR transparency wording.
If you have any questions regarding these new standards or about clinical research in general, please email Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor – swignall@bournemouth.ac.uk or clinicalresearch@bournemouth.ac.uk
The NIHR Be Part of Research platform is an online service that makes it easy for research participants to find and take part in health and social care research. Participants may search for trials and studies taking place looking at certain health conditions and in locations accessible to them.
Clinical researchers may also make use of the service to extend their recruitment and widen their recruitment methods, as the platform has been designed to make it easier for researchers and potential study participants to find each other.
To use the service for your recruitment, the study must meet the following requirements:
Additionally, to make sure that participants contact the appropriate person, the contact details provided on ISRCTN or ClinicalTrials.gov should be up to date and accurate. In general, the registry record should be monitored continuously so that any changes are reflected on Be Part of Research as soon as possible.
If you have any questions regarding the platform or regarding clinical research in general, please email Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor: swignall@bournemouth.ac.uk or clinicalresearch@bournemouth.ac.uk
This week Research.com, a leading academic platform for researchers, finished releasing the 2023 rankings of best scientists and universities in the world across all major scientific disciplines. Click here for a quick summary of how Bournemouth University stood in these rankings.
Congratulations go to 13 BU scholars who are listed in this world ranking! Top of the list is Professor Dimitrios Buhalis!
The single largest group of six BU academics belonged to ‘Ecology & Evolution’, two scholars are based in ‘Environmental Science’ and one each fit into six other individual scientific disciplines.
Yesterday the Nepal Journal of Epidemiology published our editorial on ‘Strengthening Healthcare through Academic and Industry Partnership Research’ [1]. The editors put the editorial on the cover of the latest issue of the journal. Academic and Industry Partnership Research can drive medical innovation, strengthen patient-centred research, and close the gap between theoretical understanding and real-world implementations. The UK’s dedication to developing long-term alliances based on mutual respect and open dialogue can facilitate an environment where ground-breaking research can flourish and be transformed into affordable health and social care solutions.Half of the authors are associated with Bournemouth University, two are Visiting Faculty (Prof. Dr. Padam Simkhada and Dr. Brijesh Sathian) and the third one is Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH). The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is an Open Access journal and therefore the paper is freely available to read to anyone across the globe.
References:
Creating your impact development plan is a workshop for researchers at all career stages and at all stages of the project lifecycle – from formulating research questions and preparing grant applications to developing a potential impact case study.
This practical workshop provides the tools, advice and time to start putting together your own plan to achieve impact.
By the end of this session, you will have created a detailed impact development plan, tailored to your particular needs and stage of impact development.
To book on to the session, please complete the Booking Form.
For queries regarding the content of this session, please contact Amanda Lazar, Impact Adviser impact@bournemouth.ac.uk
Dr Rejoice Chipuriro a Post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Social Science and Social Work has been awarded a grant from the NIHR Clinical Research Network Wessex. The grant is aimed at generating new insights into asylums seekers’ lived experiences with community based mental health care support services. This study involves partnership between Bournemouth University and Vita Nova- a community arts organisation that supports people in recovery from addiction. Vita Nova works in a holistic way to support members with their ongoing recovery programs which helps to avoid relapse back into treatment centres, mental health institutions or prison.
In recent years Vita Nova has worked with other underserved communities including asylum seekers, for example the Refugee Nativity last Christmas with local asylum seekers which brought communities together and raised awareness of the current refugee crisis. Vita Nova uses creativity to process trauma as a form of art therapy. Asylum seekers will be supported by Vita Nova to co-produce drama and photography for public exhibition to connect with mental health service in community, as well as the public, to dispel stigma around mental health and marginalisation of asylum seekers. The photo exhibition will also be co-designed with asylum seekers as a way for participants to share about their lived experiences, and break taboos about mental health.
Talking about this new research Dr Rejoice Chipuriro shared the following, ‘Mental health is a priority area for the NHS. Asylum seekers are listed by the NIHR as an underserved group in health research which is why this research seeks to generate new knowledge about mental health which is co-produced with asylum seekers.’
Michael Armstrong the Creative Producer at Vita Nova had this to share , ‘ As we step into a new chapter, we’re reflecting on the journey that brought us here. Rooted in the centre of Boscombe, our charity has dedicated itself to empowering community members and artists alike for almost 25 years. Through a rich tapestry of events and projects, we’ve woven connections, shared stories, and nurtured creativity. The partnership with Bournemouth University advances our approach to evaluation and how we can capture the voices of some of the most vulnerable people in our wonderful community.’
Sharon Coyne, Artistic Director at Vita Nova says ‘our partnership with Bournemouth University really helps us think differently about how we communicate the experience of our wonderful members and engage new partners and (hopefully) new funders’.
Congratulations Rejoice!
Today we held the first International Advisory Group for the Sonamoni project. Sonamoni is a BU research project with CIPRB (the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh) which aims to design and develop interventions to reduce the number of young children drowning in Bangladesh. The public health project is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through its Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website. 
We are grateful to the members of our International Advisory Board for volunteering to do this important work. We were struck by the dedication of the international team members this morning. We especially admire the International Advisory Board member who was online at 21.00 local time in Australia and even more perhaps our member in Canada for whom the local time was 3.00 in the morning.
Sonamoni is being coordinated by Bournemouth University in collaboration with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). This project, with Prof. Dr. Aminur Rahman as Bangladesh lead, includes a BU-based PhD project. The interdisciplinary team at Bournemouth University covers three faculties through: Dr. Mavis Bengtsson, Dr. Kyungjoo Cha, Dr. Mehdi Chowdhury, Dr. Yong Hun Lim, Mr. John Powell, and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.
Postdoc Appreciation Week(PAW) takes place each year to celebrate, showcase and recognise the contribution that postdoctoral researchers make towards research and academic life.
Originally an initiative from the National Postdoc Association in the USA (National Postdoc Appreciation Week), it is now also celebrated in the UK, and this year will take place from Monday 18th – Friday 22nd September.
To mark Postdoc Appreciation Week, we are holding an appreciation event on Monday 18 September for postdoctoral researchers and their managers.
The event will be a chance to celebrate all the hard work that postdocs and researchers dedicate to research, teaching, outreach and so much more, as well as an opportunity to catch up with our Research Staff Association (RSA) representatives over coffee and cake.
We will also be profiling the amazing work and research undertaken by our post-doctoral research staff community.
If you would like to attend the event, or find out more about our Postdoc Appreciation Week activity, please contact RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk
You can also get involved on social media during Postdoc Appreciation Week by using #LovePostdocs and #NPAW2023 on Twitter and Instagram and tagging us @BU_Research or @UK_NPAW.
Here are some great RKEDF training events coming up in September
Click on the titles to see details and book a place on to upcoming events.
New Generation Thinkers 2024 AHRC/BBC Radio 3 Tuesday 5th September 11:00-12:30 Talbot Campus
This is an introduction to the New Generation thinkers, how it works, how to apply and with a mock panel set up.
RKEDF: British Academy Small Grants Workshop Wednesday 6th September 10:00-12:00 Talbot Campus
BA Small Grants Workshop aimed at all staff with Research Council bids in development. The attendees will have the chance to discuss their proposal with a Research Facilitator and a Funding Development Officer will also be on hand to answer any questions relating to budget and processes.
Impact Essentials:creating your impact development plan Thursday 7th September 13:00-15:00 Talbot Campus
For researchers at all stages of the project lifecycle – from formulating research questions and preparing grant applications to developing a potential impact case study.
Introduction to RED – The Research & Enterprise Database Tuesday 12th September 15.30-16.00 Online session
This session is aimed at all academics to provide an overview of the Research & Enterprise Database, including how to access the system, the information available to view, budget management via RED, and how to use RED to identify your supporting pre and post award officers.
Principal Investigation – Post Award for RKE Wednesday, 13th September 14:00-15:00 Talbot Campus
This session is aimed at any researcher who is, who plans to be, a Principal Investigator for an externally funded research or knowledge exchange project.
This session is fully booked but please feel free to book your place on one of the next months’ sessions
Thursday, 19th October 14.00-15.00 Lansdowne Campus Thursday, 15th November 14.00-15.00 Talbot Campus Wednesday, 13th December 14.00-15.00 Lansdowne Campus Wednesday, 10th January 14.00-15.00 Talbot Campus
For any queries regarding these workshops, please contact the RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk
BU staff can login below:
PGR Coffee and Cake Social Event
Café Scientifique Tuesday 3 October 2023 – Reconnecting Europe’s rivers: how can citizen scientists help monitor the results?
Conversation article: Like many women, I didn’t know I was autistic until adulthood – how late diagnosis can hurt mental health and self image
Research Information Network
The Wellcome trust ECR award is for researchers from any discipline with up to 3 years post-doctoral experience doing research that has the potential to improve human life, health and wellbeing. This session is aimed at research leads, Early Career Researchers and mentors.
Time for Something New?
Association to Horizon Europe – Agreement in Principle Reached
Webinar – ERC grants 2024
Two papers based on ERASMUS+ exchange