Discovering theses & dissertations

Theses and dissertations are unpublished submissions at either doctoral or masters level. There are a number of tools and platforms available to discover these.  Some will provide access to the full text or previews while others will provide bibliographic details only.


Internationally

Proquest Dissertations & Theses : UK & Ireland - the library subscribes to this database. It is a comprehensive database of doctoral theses from Ireland and UK.  

There are basic and advanced keyword searches and content may also be browsed by subject or location. Users may create a personal account (My Research) for saving your searches, organising your documents, creating search alerts. 

EthOS - e-theses online service - searches over 450,000 UK doctoral theses.  Many theses are available for free immediate download.  Using this website you may search and read theses on your topic.  This will provide examples of how to structure and approach a thesis.

DART-Europe E-theses portal - Access to 724,769 open access research theses from 606 Universities in 28 European countries


Nationally

Rian provides a path to open access research publications including doctoral and masters submissions.  The advanced search allows you to select these items only.


Locally

ITT Tallaght Library Catalogue - You may search local theses deposited at IT Tallaght Library here

Arrow - This is the Institutional Repository incorporating DIT, ITT and ITB publications. You may browse the theses collection here.

Accessing print collections of theses

You will not always be able to access digital versions of theses.  If there are print collections available in libraries then you may be able to visit the library.  Details for IT Tallaght staff and students about visiting libraries in Ireland may be found here.  

What are altmetrics?

Definition

"Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices like the h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010,[1][2] as a generalization of article level metrics,[3] and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.[4] Altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media."

From & See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetrics

The concept has been around for 5+ years now, and is slowly gaining ground, especially with those who want to trace the impact of their writings on the social web. (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs etc. - shares basically). The argument is that online sharing does not invoke the same behaviours as traditional methods and consequently needs its own set of metrics. There are different characteristics to the behaviours and these generate different data that that traditionally collated by impact factor generators, therefore creating the need for a new approach to measuring impact > Altmetrics.

For example Elsevier clusters like kinds of activity for this type of reporting, rather than compressing all activities into one.



Image from: http://altmetrics.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/four-ways-to-measure-impact-copy.png

Leaders in the field include

• Altmetrics
• Plum
• PLOS (code)
• http://impactstory.org - free (plugs into Google Scholar My Citations)

Some of these interact with other services such as Vivo, Profiles, SciVal, Experts, and Figshare.

• Altmetrics are starting to appear in subscription resources as sub products or reports.
• Altmetrics are a way for crowd sourced / funded projects. to measure their success in reaching their targets. They enable researchers to be able to assess whether they are reaching the right market / population with outreach and gives context to the research / paper.
• Recent trends include tweetable abstract submissions

Spaces to watch

• growkudos.com
• ORCID
• Counter (use in Institutional Repositories).
• Altmetric explorer - a web application that helps you see the attention your publications are getting.

Read more at: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/


Related blog posts - Keep track of citations to your articles - enhance your online reputation

Keep track of citations to your articles - enhance your online reputation

Suggestions for researchers to enhance online reputation

There are a number a useful places for researchers to maintain an online profile and showcase their work.
These tools enable you to track your citations and h-index and make your publications easily retrievable. Some are detailed below:

Google Scholar Citations

• Create a public profile e.g. Eamon Maher, Michael O'Connell

Researcher ID (Web of Science)

• Make your publications easily retrievable with your Research ID badge

Other similar communities and useful links :

Academic Search (Microsoft)
MyScienceWork
Academic.edu

ResearchGate

Mendeley

ARROW@DIT - Institutional repository administered by DIT

Kudos - a free web service that helps promote your research - Kudos user guide .  It can link to your ORCID ID (see below).

ORCID - provides a platform to link these communities together

ORCID provides a unique persistent identifer number linked to your research e.g. Wouter Gerritsma

Already have a Researcher ID? 
A number of organisations have integrated the ORCID registry.  ResearcherID has created an integration with ORCID that allows users to transfer publications as well as profile data between the two systems. From the user's ResearcherID profile or ORCID record they can initiate a link which will add the ORCID ID to their RID account and their RID number to their ORCID record. The user then has the option to transfer works and basic biographical information between the two systems.

Ten things you need to know about ORCID

With an ORCID ID you can join Impactstory for free. With Impactstory you can track buzz on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and more: we're like Google Scholar for your research's online reach. Making a profile takes just seconds:

Social Media

Health check your digital identity - a resource from piirus.ac.uk (accessed 10/11/2016)
Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities from the LSE impact blog (accessed 10/11/2016)

Which one should I use?

It is suggested that you have an online presence on them all.  At any one time your citation metrics will be different on each profile so link to the best profile for funding proposals etc.


Academic spam
You should also be aware of academic spam.  A useful blog post from libfocus covers this topic.

Citation metrics
Bibliometrics are measures of an author's influence or impact - Bibliometrics for the individual - NDLR.
Altmetrics - What are altmetrics?

Other related blog topics -
Keeping up to date - current awareness




Image - Pixabay

Scientific reading and writing skills - recommended resources

An essential skill for science students is to communicate ideas and facts in a clear and precise way.

I have listed some useful resources below which will provide advice on

• reading 
• note-taking 
• lab reports 
• writing summaries and essays 
• grammar
• revision

Library ITT Dublin books - 

Pechenik, J.A., Lamb, B.C. & Pechenik, J.A. 1994, How to write about biology, HarperCollins.- check library availability

Boyle, Jennifer & Ramsay, Scott 2017, Writing for science students, Palgrave Study Skills - check library availability

Thody, A. 2006, Writing and presenting research, SAGE. - check library availability

Alley, M. 1996, The craft of scientific writing, Springer.- check library availability

Barrass, R. 2002, Scientists must write, Routledge. - check library availability

The "Practical skills" series of books - check availability

Godfrey, Jeanne 2014, "Reading & Making Notes", Palgrave - check library availablility

Online resources -
Hopkins, W. (1999) How to Write a Literature Review and How to Write a Research Paper. Available: http://www.sportsci.org/.  Last accessed 04/01/14. [From the homepage go to Research Resources > Writing]

Reading skills tutorial produced by University of Leeds - http://library.leeds.ac.uk/tutorials/reading/

Reinvent - a tutorial produced by ITT Dublin

Infographic: How to Read Scientific Papers from Elsevier



Other related blogposts - Literature Reviews

Semantic Scholar launched - free computer science search engine

A new search engine called Semantic Scholar has been launched by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence.  It is a free product which currently searches approx. 3 million open-access papers in computer science.

Innovative features include picking out the most important keywords from the text without the author or publishers input.  It extracts figures from documents and presents them in the results list alongside paper references and citing papers.

Semantic Scholar also identifies which of a paper's cited references were influential.

Try it out at Semantic Scholar.

Peer review - 3 minute introduction

Here's a quick and easy introduction to the concepts behind, issues around, and types of peer reviewed articles.
 
for more information see: https://www.elsevier.com/reviewers/what-is-peer-review 

Literature Reviews - the library has resources to help

Reviewing the literature is an essential part of a research project.

Below are some recommended library resources that you may find useful when starting.

Books:

Biggam, J. 2018,  Succeeding with your masters dissertation : a step-by-step handbook. Open University Press. Check availability

Booth, A., Papaioannou, D. & Sutton, A. 2011, Systematic approaches to a successful literature review, SAGE - check availability

Hart, C. 2017, Doing a literature review : releasing the research imagination. Sage. - check availability.

Holtom, D. & Fisher, E. 1999, Enjoy writing your science thesis or dissertation: a step by step guide to planning and writing dissertations and theses for undergraduate and graduate science students, Imperial College Press.- check availability

Jesson, J., Matheson, L. & Lacey, F.M. 2011, Doing your literature review: traditional and systematic techniques, SAGE - check availability

Machi, L.A. & McEvoy, B.T. 2009, The literature review: six steps to success, Corwin Press - check availability

Ridley, D. 2012, The literature review : a step-by-step guide for students, Palgrave Macmillan - check availability

Wisker, G. 2009, The undergraduate research handbook, Palgrave Macmillan - check availability

Note: if a book is not available you can place a request on the book by selecting the "Request" link above the book details.


Online resources:

How to write a literature review - ITT Dublin

The Final Chapter : The Undergraduate Research Project Guide - University of Leeds

Literature Reviews - University of Manchester - My Learning Essentials

Infographic: How to Read Scientific Papers from Elsevier