Every year around Valentine’s Day, universities and libraries around the world participate in Love Data Week, an effort to raise awareness related to managing, sharing, preserving, and reusing research data. Carnegie Mellon Libraries is no exception. This year, you’ll be able to find us tabling at the libraries on campus all week, with cookies, candies, giveaways, and data valentines to get students and researchers thinking about the importance of loving and caring for their research data.
What is your story… This is a question Emma Slayton and Jessica Benner have been asking through our work with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Both of us are excited to develop new services, learning opportunities, and spaces for discussion centered around spatial research. For example, earlier this year, we began offering open
office hours for those with questions concerning mapping or spatial datasets (Wednesdays between 12 and 3pm in the Sorrels library, Wean Hall floor 4).
Science research output has historically been difficult to access and reuse. It is often published in journals with very expensive subscription costs, typically paid for by university libraries. The data and code used to generate figures in publications are commonly not shared or are only shared by request. These practices have made it difficult for scientists to access, reuse, and reproduce the work of others, and have in part led to a widely reported "reproducibility crisis" in science. A related concern is that the public, which pays for a lot of science research with tax dollars, cannot access much of it.
I recently fielded a reference inquiry from an early-career researcher who was preparing to publish a manuscript based on work she had done over the preceding semester. The research direction, however, had kicked off years before, while the researcher was still a graduate student working under an advisor in a different institution, a person she had not seen or heard from since graduation. “The whole original idea came from my advisor,” the researcher began. “Don’t I have an obligation to list them as an author on this new paper?”
Open Science Framework is a free and open source tool that can be used for managing projects and collaborations in any discipline. OSF is a great way to keep track of all of the different files that are part of a complex research project. You can store files directly on OSF cloud storage (unlimited number of individual files that are under 5 GB each) or sync popular third-party applications such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3, GitHub, figshare, Mendeley, and Zotero to the project.
If you’re conducting a comprehensive literature search, perhaps for a dissertation literature review or a grant proposal, how do you know when you’ve done enough? This is a common question and there’s no simple answer. However, there are some methods that can help you feel more confident that you’ve done your due diligence and that other researchers can pick up where you left off if need be.
When conducting entrepreneurial research, one of the most important components is finding information on competitors, or competitive intelligence, as well as financing/funding information, usually in the form of private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) financing. Many times during this process it is discovered that information is needed on private companies. This is especially the case when entrepreneurs are interested in new, emerging, or niche markets. Private company information can be very difficult to obtain.
Ever find yourself spending hours formatting a bibliography for a paper, only to find that a different citation style was required? Ever wonder if there was a better way to organize your PDF files and keep track of what you’ve read? Looking for a single tool to save and organize everything from research articles to favorite websites, from recipes to RSS feeds?
