General Courses within the Doctoral Schools of Engineering, Tech and Medicine (2023)

Through participation in this course, the PhD student acquires knowledge and understanding of the use of a number of professional online tools designed to support a career in research. The course emphasizes acquisition of both theoretical and practical knowledge about research registration, profiling and evaluation, as well as the growing focus on Open Science.  

The course leans on the idea behind Scholarly Communication, which is defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries as "the system through which research and scientific publications are registered, subjected to quality assessment, disseminated to the scientific community, and preserved for future use." (ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee2003)  

 The purpose of the course is to enable PhD students to create their own sustainable strategies for publishing and disseminating research and research results, and to provide them with tools for evaluation. The course will address both traditional academic tools and introduce more recent methods.  

The course specifically addresses the following topics:  

Open Science/ Open Knowledge - including Open Access publishing  

·        Scholarly Communication: What does it mean to you as a researcher? 

·        Research registration - introduction to research registration and researcher profiles in VBN (Aalborg University's research portal) and associated systems

·        Researcher profiling – to strengthen the exposure of ​own research and research profile

·        Research evaluation – introduction to traditional and new methods including BFI, h-index and alternative metrics

·        Copyright and plagiarism for PhD students with a primary focus on the thesis

The course is aimed at all PhD students, and the teachers will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion among the participants using exercises among other things. 

Course frame 

The course is an independent part of the course series offered to PhD students at Aalborg University Library. The course is announced at Plan2Learn and Moodle, where more information and course material are available. The course is available to PhD students from all Danish universities. 

The course varies between presentations, exercises and plenary discussions. The exercises take place in groups where the students either discuss or do course-related hands-on assignments. In addition, there is a final test, which is assessed as "passed/failed". In order to obtain course ECTS points, your presence is required on the course day along with a “passed” final test. 

The course is primarily aimed at PURE users. If you do not have access to AAU's PURE installation, you will still be able to use what you have learned when you get back to your own institution. However, there will be local differences in the options offered by the system. 

The course is in English. 

There is a reading list attached to the course. 

Planning and teaching: The VBN Team 

Course learning targets 

The course provides the PhD student with a toolbox for strategic focus on researcher profiling, including:

·      How to get an overview of registration and dissemination requirements for PhD research results in a scientific context. This includes the actual PhD thesis, as well as preparation of different types of publications and profiles. 

·      How to acquire new knowledge regarding opportunities and strategies for publishing research, including Open Access.   

·      Providing the PhD student with skills to develop communication strategies. This may include an understanding of how to work with Open Science e.g. through qualitative and quantitative metrics.  

Course reading list 

P. M. Melchiorsen, "Bibliometric differences – a case study in bibliometric evaluation across SSH and STEM", Journal of Documentation (2019), vol. 75(2), pp. 366-378. (13 p.)  

Bibliometric differences – a case study in bibliometric evaluation across SSH and STEM | Emerald Insight  

L. Bornemann & L. Haunschild, “Alternative article-level metrics. The use of alternative metrics in research evaluation”. EMBO Reports (2018), vol. 19, article no. E47260. (4 p.) 

https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201847260  

E. C. McKiernan, P. E. Bourne, C. Titus Brown, et al., "How open science helps researchers succeed". eLife (2016), Vol. 5, article no. e16800. (19 p.)

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800  

T. Ross-Hellauer, J. P. Tennant, V. Banelytė, et al., "Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research". PLOS Computational Biology (2020), vol. 16(4), article no. E1007704. (12 p.) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007704 

F. Schönbrodt, “Training students for the Open Science future”. Nat Hum Behav (2019), Vol. 3, article No. 1031. (1 p.) 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0726-z 

Further reading:  

P. Smart, S. Holmes, F. Lettice, et al., "Open Science and Open Innovation in a socio-political context: knowledge production for societal impact in an age of post-truth populism". R&D Management (2019), Vol. 49(3), pp. 279-297. (19 p.) 

https://doi-org.zorac.aub.aau.dk/10.1111/radm.12377  

M. Watson, “When will ‘open science’ become simply ‘science’?”. Genome Biology (2015), vol. 16(101). (3 p.) 

When will ‘open science’ become simply ‘science’? - ProQuest (aau.dk)  

B. Voytek, “Social Media, Open Science, and Data Science Are Inextricably Linked”. National Library of Medicine. Neuron (2017), vol. 96(6), pp. 1219-1222. (4 p.) 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.11.015 

P. R. Cintra, A.C. Furnival & D. H. Milanez, "The impact of open access citation and social media on leading top Information Science journals". Investigación Bibliotecologica (2018), vol. 32(77), pp. 117-132. (16 p.) 

http://rev-ib.unam.mx/ib/index.php/ib/article/view/57874

P. Ayris, A. L. de San Román, K. Maes, et al., "Open Science and its role in universities: A roadmap for cultural change”, Advice paper (2018), 1-31 pp. (32 p.)

https://www.leru.org/files/LERU-AP24-Open-Science-full-paper.pdf