Learn about building and promoting your research profile
A researcher profile identifies researchers and their work in the scientific community. It aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications using a unique identifier called Profile ID that can be shared with your colleagues.
Having an author profile ensures that your work is attributed to you and connects you with other researchers within and beyond the University and increases the impact of your research.
Whatever platform you use, it is important that you keep your profile up to date to reflect your research activities accurately.
Learn about metrics, including bibliometrics and altmetrics
One of the challenges faced by researchers is to identify the impact their output is having in their disciplines as it plays an important role in:
Hiring and promotion – Citation metrics have been reviewed by hiring and promotion committees.
Grant applications– Funders require evidence of researchers’ impact.
Annual reports – Metrics can highlight the most influential research in your organisation or department.
Faculty and departmental webpages – Featuring researchers’ contributions and collaborations to their field. authors are responsible for communicating about their research among other scholars and expanding its impact beyond their own institutions to their community and the broader society.
Research impact can be measured in 2 ways:
1- Citation metrics (Bibliometrics) are quantitative ways that assess the research output based on the number of outputs published, and the number of citations these outputs have received within the literature of a discipline.
They can be divided into:
an author (author-level metrics)
a journal article, book, book chapter or other document (document-level metrics)
These databases contain data from thousands of peer-reviewed sources.
Citation metrics can be influenced by academic disciplines so care needs to be taken to make sure your judgement is fair.
Please consider:
When assessing citation metrics, it should be kept in mind that there is no comprehensive tool as they don’t index all publications or research areas. Each citation platform has its coverage limits (journal titles and years).
Using metrics responsibly:
Metrics should be used with caution because of:
Disciplinary variation: There are wide differences as to the citation behaviour and trends between disciplines, and using ‘field weighted’ metrics is often not enough to allow for this, for example, humanities researchers tend to publish books and so many research articles remain uncited. Full consideration of the disciplinary context is advised.
Database differences:The same metric can be different in different databases, for example, your h-index might be different in Scopus and Google Scholar. This is because each database has different coverage as to the publications it indexes, so the source of data is an important consideration.
Metric limitations: Each metric will have limitations because no methodology behind their calculation could ever be perfect. For example, the disciplines that generally receive fewer citations will mean a citation has more weight when using the SNIP metric. A consideration of what the particular metric is measuring is therefore also important.
Bias:Bias in citation practices can take many forms, for example, in medicine positive rather than neutral or negative correlations are more likely to be cited. An awareness of the behaviours that lead to citing or not citing a paper can provide many insights.
2- Altmetrics (alternative metrics) are qualitative data based on online activity and engagement to show how research is being shared, discussed and reused within the academic community.
This may occur in three main areas:
Online activity e.g. mentions in blog posts, comments, reviews; social media likes, shares or tweets; and usage such as downloads, views or saves
Attributions in non-academic or grey literature e.g. government or non-government reports, discussion papers or policy documents; news or other media reports
Research outputs which are not published academic papers e.g. datasets, code or software, conference posters, guidelines, websites
Example metrics:
Tweets, shares or likes.
Downloads, clicks or views.
Saves, bookmarks or likes.
Reviews, comments or mentions or blog posts.
Citation indexes, Policy citations, clinical citations or patent citations.
Sources of Altmetrics:
Altmetric.comis the provider of Altmetrics with subscription for publishers, researchers and institutions. It tracks where published research is mentioned online by following specific sources, including social media, news sources, government and non-government reports, blogs, Wikipedia, policy documents etc, and text-mines them for links to research.
Altmetric Explorer is a service that allows you to see how much attention any article with a DOI (digital object identifier) has received online by using a bookmarklet tool. They also have another subscription product calledAltmetric Explorer for Institutions
If you want to see the Altmetric information for one particular article, add theAltmetric Bookmarkletto your browser. Click ‘Altmetric it!’ to see the Attention Score in your browser, plus a link to the Altmetric details page.
PlumX: generates altmetrics on articles, book chapters and conference papers, and is embedded in databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect and EBSCOhost.
SciVal: provides data, metrics and benchmarking which can support evidence of societal impact. It contains data on research publications cited in policy documents and patent citations.
Please consider:
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) can only be used as an evidence of your research impact by uncovering engagement in government policy, news sources, blogs, clinical guidelines ; High scores are indicative of high engagement.
A combination of quantitative and qualitative data provides a more comprehensive picture of research activities.
Publish and share your research
Find how to select a journal to publish in and check journal rankings, share your outputs and enhance your discoverability, open access publishing
Where to Publish?
Finding the right journal can be a challenge. Follow the steps below to select an appropriate journal.
Here are some tools to find journals to publish in
Use a database such as Scopus / Web of Science to consider where top authors in the field are publishing.
Open access publishing refers to research outputs that are accessible to the public without any restrictions including licensing, fees, personal information or an account with the publisher.
Why is open access publishing important?
The open access movement is based upon the belief that everyone should have access to scholarly findings. Subscription-based publishing models often exclude those without institutional affiliations or the financial resources to pay subscription fees.
The quality of research increases because research methods become more transparent and scientific results are easier to reproduce.
Researchers increase the visibility of their work and the chances of their output being used (cited, downloaded).
Researchers easily collaborate with each other when research findings are available immediately and worldwide. Working together ensures innovative perspectives of the results and reduces research costs.
How to publish in open access?
There are two primary routes to achieve Open Access:
Open archiving
The author archives a digital copy of his work in an online repository and makes this copy freely available to the public. (Green OA).
An embargo period often applies, meaning the archived version will be available later after the version published on the publisher’s website.
The archived version is usually the submitted or accepted version but not the final.
Open publishing
The author publishes his work immediately in OA with the publisher, making the published version freely available to the public.
For-profit OA (Full Gold or Hybrid Gold): Authors are required to pay author fees.
Non-profit OA (Full Gold or Diamond): Authors may not pay fees as the publishing infrastructure is funded, allowing both authors and readers to access the work at no cost.
Open Access Models
In open access journals, the author sometimes pays an article processing charge (APC) to cover the cost of publishing. But some open access journals rely on institutional support, grants and memberships to fund their publication and do not charge APCs, allowing authors to make their articles openly available without payment.
There are many forms of open access publishing models that researchers need to understand to choose the most suitable way to share their work including:
· Gold OA – this method is available for articles published in fully open access journals. It requires payment of an article processing charge (APC), which may be paid by authors or a third party. It simply means that the article is freely available from the journal itself under a Creative Commons license. Prestigious open access journals with high impact factors often charge high article processing charges (APCs).
· Hybrid OA – refers to a journal that publishes both gold open access and traditional subscription-based research where authors have the choice to either pay an APC and have their work published as open access, or to submit it as a non-OA article.
· Green OA – publishing under a journal that permits self-archiving of the article in an institutional or subject repository usually after an embargo period (waiting period) that is set by the publisher, such as 6, 12 or even 24 months. No charges are paid. (publishers often request that authors respect an embargo period before the work is released openly).
It is often that the ‘author accepted manuscript’, is archived online that does not include any of the work typically carried out by the publisher, such as copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, indexing, metadata tagging, marketing or distribution.
Diamond OA –this model is used by not-for-profit entities. It is a form of Gold Open Access in which there is no author fees (APC). Funding for the journal publishing comes from alternative sources.
Bronze OA – Articles marked as ‘Open Access’ without a Creative Commons license, and/or without charge of an APC to the author.
Publishing Agreements at the University
To support open access publishing, the British University was listed among other 150 Egyptian institutions in the publishing agreement between Springer Nature and Science, Technology & Innovation Funding Authority (STDF) in cooperation with Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB).
To find out more about this agreement:
Check he Springer Nature open access agreements for Egypt.
Check the Egyptian Knowledge Bank statement about this agreement from here .
Predatory Publishing
Refers to open access publishers that ask authors to pay the costs of publication without applying standardized practices such as thorough peer review, copy editing, etc.
Some tips to identify predatory journals
Check if the journal is listed in theDirectory of Open Access Journals. This is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Check the indexing claims of the journals to ensure if they are indexed in the major academic databases as they stated or not like Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, etc.
These journals also claim that they have an impact factor. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is the best place to check if the journal has a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or check its SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) at the SCImago Journal & Country Rank portal that includes journals rankings developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database.
Check the submission and acceptance dates on the papers published in the journal and see if there is enough time for a serious peer review.
Check the quality of the articles published in this journal.
Institutional repositories
Learn how institutional repositories help in preserving the scholarly output of institutions
Institutional repositories are used to make scholarly works written by the researchers at a specific institution freely accessible. This can be applied to article pre-prints and manuscripts, technical reports, conference proceedings, data sets, and software, as well as theses and dissertations.
These repositories allow researchers to retain their copyrights to their manuscripts.
by depositing your work in a repository, you’ll get:
A stable URL for the work that you can share with others. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work.
Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others.
Some metrics of how the work has been used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.
The BUE Scholar is a collection of research outputs produced by University researchers. Access to this research is free, and the repositoryis managed by the Research Office.
Open research
What is Open Research?
Open Research is a set of policies and practices that ensure transparency, openness, collaboration and integrity in research, and support wide dissemination and reproducibility of scientific research (including open access to scholarly publications, data, code, educational resources, software and hardware).
Open research also helps to support collaboration within and across disciplines.
Examples of open research practices might include: early sharing of findings and data, as preprints; using open source software; open hardware; open access publishing or archiving; open and “findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible” (FAIR) records of non-journal article outputs, including FAIR data; and open or institutional peer review.
The goals of open research are to:
Reach as many people as possible to increase your visibility and allow re-use of research.
Allow others to validate and contribute to your research.
Enhance trust in research outputs and institutions.
Support collaboration and impact.
Expectations of researchers:
Open access for outputs where all scholarly outputs are freely available, e.g. for scholarly articles via preprint platforms, at the time point of journal publication if not before, for other outputs via appropriate repositories at the earliest possible point.
Open data. Data underlying publications to be made openly available and FAIR were legally, ethically, and technically possible, as well as referenced via a data access statement in the publication.
License. Adopt copyright licenses which support sharing and reuse for research outputs including data, code and publications, where possible.
Transparent research methods. Share process and methods used in obtaining and evaluating research results (e.g., by publishing research software using best practice techniques for reproducibility.
Support reproducibility of results, both by themselves and by independent researchers
Related terms:
Open Source:
Computer software codes that are made publicly and freely available to access, use, and enhance, as needed, by adding an open-source license.
Open Peer Review:
Refers to various alternative review methods that seek to make traditional closed peer review more transparent and accountable.
Open Notebooks:
Data from laboratory experiments are recorded in open electronic notebooks that are easily accessible to other researchers and can be accessed in future experiments and related research work.
Open Access:
Refers to several publishing models that seek to provide immediate open access to published research works.
Educational resources, which includes teaching, learning and research materials, that are made openly available, and a Creative Commons licence added to describe how it may be used.
Open Data:
Research data that is freely available for anyone to access, use, and share.
Research Workshops
The Library delivers a series of research support workshops that are repeated throughout the year; however it is available to request workshops on demand as per your faculty’s research needs.
The workshops listed below will be repeated throughout the year
It is available to request workshops on demand as per your faculty research needs
View all upcoming workshops for researchers
Request a researcher consultation
Get personalised support from our librarians
To assist you with your research enquiries, the Library provides advice and assistance for researchers at all stages of their research journey.
