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Turku University Library

Keeping up

Research news and science policies

In addition to keeping up with your own discipline, it's also important to know what's happening in the politics of academic reseach. Here are some publications and sites where you can follow discussions on science and its policies.

EuroScientist: EuroScientist is the official journal of EuroScience, a grassroots association of scientists and people with an interest in science-related matters in Europe. It focuses on issues arising from the interface with society in Europe, including science policy.

Flipboard: A news aggregator and social network, wher you can catch up on the news you care about, read stories from around the world and browse the articles, videos and photos other people are sharing. To begin, pick a few topics and tap any of the tiles to begin flipping through your personal magazine.

Medium: A social journalism platform "where readers can find dynamic thinking, and where expert and undiscovered voices can share their writing on any topic". Medium is a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or Medium's own blogs or publishers.

Scholarly Kitchen: A blog about "What's hot and cooking in scholarly publishing" by the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

Science Daily: ScienceDaily, founded in 1995, is a site for research news in healthcare, technical science, environmental and social sciences. Updated several times a day.

Science News: Publication and research news site focusing on natural sciences.

TED: TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). It began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics – from science to business to global issues – in more than 100 languages.

Academic social media

Use of social media is growing in popularised scholarly communication. Organisations, institutes, and individual researchers often report their work and current issues e.g. on Twitter of Facebook. Research projects and publications are gaining visibility through likes, shares, and comments – locally and worldwide. To get more bang for your buck on Twitter you could try following some of the hashtags mentioned in this article: 53 hashtags for academia to expand your academic network.

There are also more academic channels where you can follow your favourite scientists and top researchers in your field. For example, ResearchGate and Academia.edu are popular services as “researcher social media”. In Google Scholar, you can create your own profile and follow not only articles or references but also specific scholars.

Screencap of Google Scholar's author citation indices with citation count, h-index, and i10-index, as well as a bar chart showing growth in citations 2009-2017.


Social media examples

Research information portals

Research information portals (current research information systems, CRIS), gather information on both ongoing and finished research projects conducted at an organisation. They include information about authors, research groups, publication types, organisations and funding, and often a parallel version of the publication. Due to the mandatory research output reporting and collection by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, most CRIS solutions also enable researchers to create comprehensive academic CVs and scholarly profiles. Below are some examples of CRIS's used in Finnish universities.

  • UTUCRIS (University of Turku)
  • TUNICRIS (former Tampere University of Technology, now part of Tampere University)
  • LACRIS (University of Lapland)

 

Read more about self-archiving (Green OA) in the UTUCRIS guide.

Open Access Portals

General Open Access directories

Journal and book directories

Other portals

 

Other resources

 

Finnish Open Access portals and repositories

Conferences and academic seminars

Domestic and international scholarly conferences are important opportunities for networking and discussing current research. Conference presentations are usually based on the latest or ongoing studies and therefore provide newest information. Especially in technology and similar disciplines, conference proceedings are often the most valued type of publication.

In learned societies', research centres', and departments' seminars you can attend talks and lectures the same way as in larger conferences. In addition there's usually workshops focused on a particular problem or topic, where like-minded researchers get to share and exchange ideas. 

Research organisations and departments often let you know about upcoming conferences on their mailing lists. There are also several web pages that collect and share information about scientific conferences around the world, such as:

Colleagues and break rooms

Keep in touch with colleagues and specialists in your field with similar research interests! Both formal and informal communication is vital between people who are interested in the same things, share projects or, for example, use the same data stored in an open repository. Academic "break room conversations" offer opportunities to share information that might not get articulated in more rigid or formal scholarly communication.

You could even set up a journal club or a reading circle, where everyone reads a specific research article and then you can meet up an discuss its merits or possible shortcomings. There may be others in your specific field or subject who are interested in the same topics as you and eager to discuss them face to face.

Podcasts

Lately, podcasts have become a major platform for communication, discussion and promotion of content across the globe. Here are some suggestions of what to listen to when you need inspiration, distraction from routine work or just something to listen to when you take time to unwind.

Blogs

Blogs, vlogs, and interactive discussion boards can act as low threshold services for researchers and their debates. Scholarly communication is constantly speeding up, getting more direct and less peer-reviewed, as scholars and researchers around the world get to comment on each others' brand new ideas and inventions the second they are released online. Research groups and individual researchers describe and report how their work is progressing in these forums.

You can look for blogs for example in OpenEdition Blogs Catalogue.

Society for Scholarly Publishing's Scholarly Kitchen has the latest in scholarly publishing.

For people interested in data analysis and the R language: R-bloggers.