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When this semester started it was hardly possible to anticipate how it would unfold. I sincerely hope, that the effects of the pandemic for you so far, have not gone beyond dry hands, Zoom meetings, and loops around people at the grocery store.
For many, however, the reality is much harsher. Across the world, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of people have lost their jobs, and the overall societal and economic effects are still hard to measure and fathom.
Although the future is perhaps more difficult to predict than ever, we are happy that we now are moving towards a partial re-opening of Karlstad University. For us, things will not be ’as before’, but we will extend our opening hours, and students, staff, and the general public will be welcome to us also on weekends. Measures will be in place to help maintain physical distance, which e.g. means that there will be fewer seats in the library.
In terms of our support to you as researchers, we hope that you have not experienced any difficulty getting help from us, during this semester. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve our research support, do not hesitate to contact us.
We wish you all a wonderful summer, stay safe and take care!
Magnus Åberg, Newsletter editor
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- ...that our web info to researchers now has its own landing page: https://www.kau.se/en/library/researchers. On the landing page, we aim to highlight the most current information of relevance for you as researcher. As before, you can find all library information to researchers by clicking ’Researchers’ in the top menu.
- … that PhD students now are welcome to register for our doctoral course Information Retrieval (3 ECTS). This autumn (week 41 through 48), the course will be given in English and targets students in the beginning of their research career. Besides information retrieval, the course covers topics such as publishing strategies, open access, bibliometrics, and copyright issues. The course provides useful knowledge for your entire research career, and gives you a chance to meet and discuss with Ph.D students from other disciplines. Do not wait to sign up, admission is limited! For more information about the course and how to sign up click here.
- … that for those of you using the reference style APA6, we are now – together with the international community – moving to APA7. This transition will be completed during the summer, and our reference manual changed accordingly. The American Psychological Association provides more guidance on APA7 in their APA style and grammar guidelines.
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The aim of open access to research data is to increase the transparency, usability and availability of research, thereby benefitting the scientific community, businesses, organisations and society as a whole.
Today, more and more journals, funders, and universities, have adopted policies pushing for open data. However, for researchers open data can be a tricky business. Many issues need to be addressed before data can be shared openly. Among other things, researchers must make sure they in fact own the right to share their data, and that it does not contain sensitive or protected information.
So, what thoughts on open data do KaU researchers have? We have spoken with, and filmed, some of your research colleagues, find out what they think here.
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Join us on Thursday 22 October, between 12-16 to learn about and discuss open data.
As mentioned above, as more and more stakeholders engage in open data, it has become a hot topic. However, open access to research data is a complex phenomenon, which can be interrogated from different angles. For example:
- What are the benefits of open data?
- How does open data fit with the integrity of research subjects?
- What are the incentives for me as researcher?
- What support can researchers who want to share data get?
- Where can and should I deposit my data?
- Can I do what I want with other people’s open data?
We have invited open data experts, both researchers and other actors, to Karlstad University to discuss these questions.
The event will be held, via Zoom and/or at KaU, depending on what the official guidelines let us do this autumn. Therefore, please save the date, more information will follow shortly after the summer.
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On 20 April 2020, the European Commission together with several partners, launched a European Covid-19 Data Platform to enable the rapid collection and sharing of available research data on the disease.
Via the platform, researchers can store and share datasets, such as DNA sequences, protein structures, data from pre-clinical research and clinical trials, as well as epidemiological data.
In addition, on June 3, the Swedish Research Council announced that there now is also a national portal tied to the Europan one, Covid-19 Data Portal Sweden.
If you are interested in sharing your research data on the platforms, please visit the web site for more information: https://www.covid19dataportal.org/submit-data. Also, SciLifeLab and NBIS can provide further information on how you can contribute to the Swedish portal, see more info here.
If you have questions on how to submit data to the European portal, send a query to: virus-dataflow@ebi.ac.uk.
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A systematic review is a form of research literature review designed to identify, evaluate and summarise the results of existing research on a particular topic. Systematic reviews are useful if you need a complete and exhaustive summary of existing evidence on a specific question.
As the name suggests, compared to your everyday search for literature, a systematic review is very thoroughly done and follows specific procedures in order to ensure the quality of it. Reviews of high quality are of great benefit for other researchers, and will usually therefore receive a lot of citations.
Systematic reviews have been particularly prevalent in health and life sciences but are becoming more common also in other research fields.
If you want to know more about systematic reviews, please visit our web page for further information.
If you are a researcher or a doctoral student undertaking a systematic review and need assistance in doing a literature search, feel free to contact your subject librarian.
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This term, a small group of PhD students from various disciplines has been meeting with Roald McManus (of the library’s writing support team) on a regular basis to write in a shared space, at first in the library and then over Zoom. The purpose: to become more aware of themselves as writers of academic texts.
Meetings have taken on a certain format. Having each set for themselves a writing task ahead of time, group members tell each other their goals for the writing session. Afterwards, they share with each other the progress they have made, difficulties encountered and solutions found. The format has helped Jenni, for example, to become more aware of how she structures her writing:
“When you become aware of your writing strategy and/or find better ways to write/structure a certain piece, writing becomes natural to you.”
Since the focus is not on content, anyone wanting to start or join this type of study circle need never feel that they do not know enough about their subject. As Per writes:
“I think it is good for new PhD students just to write something to get started. It can be a draft of something, a plan, bullet-points, what you know and where the gaps are.”
There are many ways of setting up a writing group. One academic who has been a source of inspiration for many PhD students is Rowena Murray, whose podcasts on writing retreats can be found here: https://www.anchorage-education.co.uk/resources/podcasts/
If you are a PhD student writing mainly in English and are interested in forming a writing group, feel free to contact roald.mcmanus@kau.se
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In 2016, through the library consortium Bibsam, Karlstad University Library signed its first open access agreement with a major publisher of scholarly journals, SpringerNature. Now, four years later, we have agreements with a total of 14 publishers.
The primary reason for us to strive for these agreements is that they make open access publishing easier for you as researcher. As most of the agreements mean that the library prepay the open access fee, you do not have to look for funding to be able to disseminate your research openly to the world. This way, you are also relieved of the administrative hassle of managing open access invoices.
However, as each agreement has its own characteristics, and the number of agreements have increased substantially, we realise it can be difficult for you to find out what conditions apply to a specific journal.
To make the agreement landscape a bit more comprehensible we have summarised the most important aspects of each agreement in a table, which you can find here. Please remember, that if your favourite journal is not included in any of these agreements, you may still find open access funding for it from our APC-fund, which you can read more about here.
Eventually, we will be able to provide you with a digital service, enabling you to search for a specific journal and retrieve the basic open access conditions applied to it. Hopefully, this will be up and running already this summer, or in the beginning of the autumn.
As always, if you have any questions concerning open access publishing, do not hesitate to contact us at publiceringsstod@kau.se.
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Autumn is approaching quickly, which means it is time to prepare for the yearly bibliometric analysis at Karlstad University. Different from earlier years, this analysis will also include PhD students. Otherwise there are no changes.
The analysis will cover the years 2015-2019 and publication data will be gathered from DiVA. For this reason, we encourage you to check your existing DiVA records. Most of them should already be available in DiVA as we import publications with KaU affiliations from Web of Science and Scopus. If you have publications with another affiliation or publications that are not indexed in those databases you need to register them in DiVA yourself.
Please double-check that all your publications are available.
Questions? Please contact project leader Nadja Neumann, ext: 1783.
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'Meet a Researcher' ("Möt en forskare") is an open seminar series where staff, students, and the general public can listen to KaU scholars presenting interesting research findings.
This autumn’s first seminar will be held on Wednesday 23 September, between 12.00-12.45 by Ph.D. student Lennart Karlsson, from the Department of Educational Studies. He will address the topic of digitalisation and schools.
The entire autumn schedule is currently being set, and will be posted on our web page as soon as possible. All seminars will be held in the Learning Lab, floor 3 and/or via Zoom.
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As the world of research is constantly in motion, we try our best to keep up with the changes and adapt our support to you accordingly. A lot of our information is accessible via our web page https://www.kau.se/en/library/researchers.
However, sometimes it is much easier to communicate novelties and updates through dialogue, rather than just via monologue web info. We would therefore encourage you to invite us to visit your research group or department, if you want the latest on issues like information retrieval, open access, reference management, bibliometrics, academic writing guidance, copyright, or publishing strategies.
Also, if you have ideas of new areas of support you think the library should offer researchers, we are more than glad to come and discuss them with you.
We can meet you in person, if the circumstances allow it, or via that new thing you may have heard about, Zoom :-)
If you have general questions on how to set up a meeting, please contact the coordinator of the library’s research support, Ann Dyrman.
If you want us to meet with you for information on a specific topic, please contact your subject librarian.
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Remember when U.S president Donald Trump claimed that he took hydroxychloroquine to prevent him from getting Covid-19? Well, not long after that, the World Health Organization and other actors performing large randomized trials of the drug, stopped their trials. The reason for this, was a study published in the Lancet on 22 May, allegedly showing that patients using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than Covid-19 patients not taking the drugs.
Now, however, concerns have been raised over the Lancet study, and other studies, using Covid-19 patient data from the Chicago-based company Surgisphere. On 28 May, 200 clinicians and researchers published an open letter to Lancet and the study’s authors, where they call for the release of Surgisphere’s data, an independent validation of the results, and publication of peer reviewers’ comments.
Several concerns have been raised about the company Surgisphere. For example, why is its online presence so sparse, and as it claims to sit on a huge database, why has it not been used for peer-reviewed research before May 2020?
Also a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 1 May, builds on Surgisphere data, and it too has been criticized and as with the Lancet paper, also retracted. If critics are right, and the studies faulty, they have greatly harmed the development of possible Covid-19 treatments. Carlos Chaccour of the Institute for Global Health, thinks that the journals should have done more to scrutinize the data before the articles were published:
”Here we are in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the two most prestigious medical journals have failed us,” he says, as reported in this article in Science.
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