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Libraries and beyond

Ella Rhodes reports from a 'Psychology Research Day' at Senate House, London.

31 March 2016

More than 100 young academics, many of them students, gathered at the first ever Psychology Research Day at London’s Senate House to meet and learn about research skills and resources. The event, organised jointly by the British Psychological Society and Senate House Library, featured panel discussions, one-on-one advice sessions and exhibition stands, including a range of BPS teams and networks that support research. The BPS journal publishers Wiley contributed to the day with their own stand and by sponsoring refreshments an lunch.

In the first panel discussion Ian Smith, a Senior Journals Publishing Manager at Wiley, was joined by Professor Patrick Leman (King’s College, University of London) to give some tips on what the publishing process involves, and how to catch an editor’s eye. Smith ran through the basic submission and peer-review process and gave some information about the 11 BPS journals which are available to 8000 institutions throughout the world. He also gave the audience a little information on altmetrics and the increasing popularity of open access publishing.

Leman then gave some examples from his time as editor of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. He advised the students that if their paper failed to be submitted for review this often meant they had chosen the wrong journal for their work. He advised that people should check what a certain journal has published before, potentially its mission statement, what sort of work is current in the area – which could reveal who a potential reviewer may be. He said good papers have several key features – good quality science, innovative and original work, making a distinctive contribution to the area, and correctly formatted and well-written.

Expanding on each of these Leman said ‘good science’ should include a good thorough literature review, a clear line of argument, hypothesis and research question, good population sampling – taking into account representativeness and diversity, it should also be ethical and the statistical analysis should be appropriate and conclusions should follow naturally from these. Leman said new research should present a new idea, something that ‘plugs a gap in the market’. It should be topical and something that fits with recent debates either socially or within the field.

As Leman himself has only ever had one paper which was accepted straight away he explained that students should steel themselves against rejection and aim to take reviewers’ comments on board. He pointed out that reviewers have sacrificed their time to look through a paper and thus their comments should be noted, replied to and addressed where appropriate. He gave some parting words of advice on ‘revise and re-submit’ papers – not to leave those changes to the last minute, to ask people to read through the work and feed back, and not to bounce a paper from one journal rejection to another.

Using libraries for research was next up for discussion. First Thomas Baldwin, Executive Manager of the M25 consortium, gave a talk about the group which helps students access library resources within academic and other libraries in the M25 region and beyond. John Woodcock (King’s College London), Library Learning and Teaching Manager, spoke out against Google Scholar and gave ideas of better, more efficient literature searching techniques. Woodcock said Google may not be the best tool for academic literature searches as it is unclear how the algorithm works, it provides personalised results based on past browsing and its results also include non-peer-reviewed content. He gave some suggestions of potentially more useful searching tools, including PubMed and Medline. Another useful tool he pointed to was ETHoS, provided by the British Library, which consists of a searchable database of doctoral theses. He added the NICE evidence search was useful for clinicians. He also pointed to the Cochrane Library for finding systematic reviews and suggested that many universities have open-access repositories for research done at given institutions.

Ross MacFarlane (Research Engagement Officer, Wellcome Library) took the audience through a whistle-stop tour of some of the psychology-related special collections held at the recently-refurbished Wellcome Library in London. These include the papers of Charles Spearman, Henry Tajfel, Charlotte Wolff and Edward Tolman. Fascinatingly the library now also holds the dream diaries of World War II PoWs complied by Major Kenneth Hopkins.

Finally Rowena Macrae-Gibson (Head of Library Academic Services, Brunel University London) kicked off the last panel discussion around research with digital resources – her talk discussed what it meant to be a digitally literate researcher. Being digitally literate, she said, was a human right and a particularly important skill to have as a researcher in the current academic world. She emphasised the importance of using digital tools in modern research – including resources such as Dropbox and reference management tools such as Mendeley and Evernote.

Macrae-Gibson also spoke about the need to communicate research outside of academic circles. She said being digitally literate involves communication of one’s work and suggested that researchers should obtain an ORCID ID – a digital identifying number which makes work traceable even if a person moves institution or changes their name. She stressed the importance of establishing a research identity online, both through social media and within academic circles. Having more of an online presence, she suggested, may also mean the ability to better track and modify what information about you exists in the online world. Macrae-Gibson noted Twitter and LinkedIn as particularly useful tools for networking and raising one’s profile.

Paul Horsler, Academic Support Librarian and PhD student (London School of Economics), gave his view on some of his favourite reference management systems including Endnote and Mendeley and gave the pros and cons of some of the most popular software. Finally Evangelia Lipitakis from Thomson Reuters gave a talk on the benefits of using Web of Science for research which allows users to search academic literature by a huge number of criteria – including institution, number of citations, and allows reverse searches to find articles which cited a given paper.

Peter Dillon-Hooper (BPS Academic Resources Manager) said: ‘The idea for this day came out of a discussions with the senior management of Senate House Library last summer. It has been rewarding seeing that idea come to fruition through the hard work of really just a handful of people – they know who they are. But particular thanks should go to Mura Ghosh, the Psychology Research Librarian at Senate House Library, who helped make the whole thing possible. We have learnt a lot in staging this event, the feedback has been wholly positive, and we intend to do it again next year.’