Welcome!

Hello to all visitors! this blog aims to provide and promote 'information, value and access'

Friday, December 13, 2013

Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research

‘Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research: A Handbook For Social Scientists’

 now available to download as a PDF

In the past, there has been no one source of systematic advice on how to maximize the academic impacts of your research in terms of citations and other measures of influence. And almost no sources at all have helped researchers to achieve greater visibility and impacts with audiences outside the university. Instead researchers have had to rely on informal knowledge and picking up random hints and tips here and there from colleagues, and from their own personal experience.This Handbook remedies this key gap and opens the door to researchers achieving a more professional and focused approach to their research from the outset.
from: LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog 14th April 2011

Friday, December 6, 2013

Crisis in the Humanities, 2011-2012 debates



Special Report

Crisis in Humanities

Whether South Africa's humanities and social sciences will survive a university-centred and national crisis remains a controversial question. 

Collection of articles from the Mail & Guardian

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities


Available now: a guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

We have put together a short guide answering these questions, showing new users how to get started on Twitter and hone their tweeting style, as well as offering advice to more experienced users on how to use Twitter for research projects, alongside blogging, and for use in teaching.

from the LSEIpactBlog dated 29 September 2011

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The academic career path has been thoroughly destabilised...

 The academic career path has been thoroughly destabilised by the precarious practices of the neoliberal university.

It is an increasingly difficult time to begin an academic career. The pressures of the REF, casualization and adjunctification of teaching and the disappearance of research funding are enormous obstacles academics face. Sydney Calkin looks at how academics have in many ways become model neoliberal subjects. How might we effectively challenge the growing acceptance of the unpaid, underpaid, zero hours work within universities? A ‘job’ posting circulated on Twitter and Facebook in July 2013, provoking a mix of shock, anger, and hopelessness among academics, particularly young aspiring academics.

Interesting commentary follows the article on LSEImpactBlog.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Open Library of Humanities: a community-grounded approach to academic publishing

 The Open Library of Humanities is a newly-launched project aiming to provide an ethically sound and sustainable open access model for humanities research. By coordinating the discussion and implementation of a community-grounded approach to academic publishing, OLH aims to create an outlet better able to serve academics, libraries, and the wider research community. Co-founder Martin Eve describes the current “ideas phase” of the project and outlines his vision of where it will go from here.  

In the spirit of PLoS, the Open Library of Humanities aims to bring sustainable open access publishing to the humanities.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Library Research Workshops in 2014

A reminder that the Humanities & Education section staff offer workshops for staff and students.
Please contact us with your requirements
  • Introduction to research databases, e.g. Ebsco, JStore, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Sabinet (for SA information),
  • Optimal searching methods.
  • How to use RefWorks for your citations and bibiographies.
  • Setting up citation, journal issue and search alerts.
  • Tours of the Library.
  • Etc, etc...

Dr Saleem Badat in conversation with Steven Goodman on "Higher Education Today"



UDCCable TV, Higher Education Today hosted by Steven Roy Goodman.
Published September 4th 2013.
Via YouTube.