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Research Tips: Research Support

Research tips, support, strategies and FAQs

Research Process Resources

Research Governance

Research Ethics

Research Funding and Grants

Journal Alerts

Set-up email alerts for the latest articles from your favourite journals:

Or view the Subject Alerts and Journal Table of Contents RSS feeds set-up by the Library:

Or ask us to help you set-up your own email subject alerts / journal ToCs:

                             

Help with Finding Research Literature

 

BrowZine 

Browse journals on your computer with BrowZine Web! 

(use modern browser e.g. IE11 / Chrome / Firefox)

Citation Management Tools: EndNote

EndNote is a bibliographic software program by Thompson Reuters that allows you to:

  • Create a database or 'library' of references.
  • Search and download references from electronic databases and library catalogues.
  • Store downloaded PDFs with their relevant references.
  • Generate bibliographies in specific styles with the click of a button.
  • Share your library or group of references with your research colleagues.

Free for WNHS staff - see our EndNote Guide 

Other Citation Tools:

Referencing and Writing Style Guides

Journal Title Abbreviations

Find the full journal title or the abbreviation of the full title:

Research Education Modules and Workshops

Reporting Guidelines and Standards

Useful Library Books

Writing for Nursing and Midwifery Students
Qualitative research in clinical and health psychology
Clinical Trials: Study Design, Endpoints and Biomarkers, Drug Safety, and FDA and ICH Guidelines
Research methods in health: foundations for evidence-based practice
An Introduction to Systematic Reviews
The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research
Research Design : Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Method Approaches
Educational Research : Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Approaches
Studying a Study and Testing a Test : Reading Evidence-Based Health Research
Measuring Health : A Review of Subjective Health and Quality of Life MeasurementScales
Burns and Grove's the Practice of Nursing Research : Appraisal, Synthesis, and Generation of Evidence
The Practice of Social Research
The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics

Publishing Research

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is digital, online, free of access barriers, peer-reviewed research, compliant with copyright. OA is not self-publishing, backyard publishing, free of cost publishing. OA publishing models can be broadly categorized as:

  • Gold OA - author publishes in an OA journal enabling immediate access via the publisher's website. Some journals use a hybrid model involving an article processing charge (APC) to publish the article as OA.
  • Green OA - author publishes a paper in any journal then makes a version of the paper available in an OA digital research repository. The version deposited is specified by the publisher.

Open Access journal options flowchart (AOASG)

Why choose Open Access?

OA Publishers & Associations

  Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons Licences or CC Licences enable the sharing and reuse of creative content by individuals, institutions and companies. It gives people the right to make use of open access material on the Internet but only under certain conditions.

There are 6 different levels of CC Licences - click on the chart below for the permitted reuse provided by each CC Licence (CC BY Creative Commons Australia).

 

Not all CC Licences are compatible. See the following License Compatibility Chart 

For more information see Creative Commons Australia

Build an Online Profile

Register an Author ID

Create a unique researcher /author ID to link all your research thereby facilitating discovery, avoiding misidentification and enabling you to track your research for grant applications. Use the following free tools:

Join an Online Network

Choose the right publisher

Improve visibility - choose Open Access publishing:

Look for prestigious publishers in your area of interest:

Check the Impact Factor of the journal:

Demonstrate your research impact

Citation analysis

When applying for grant applications you may be asked to demonstrate your research impact via citation analysis (bibliometrics). Use Web of Science to create citation reports as a quantitative measure of impact - see Curtin University Library Guide. Other ways of counting citations:

Many databases now contain citation tracking information for individual articles including ScienceDirect; Highwire Press; Cochrane; BioMed Central

Calculate your h-index

The h-index is a metric designed to measure the productivity and impact of a researcher's work. The h-index is defined by how many h of a researcher's (or group's) publications have each had at least h citations. So a h-index of 6 means that you have published 6 papers that have all been cited at least 6 times. You can use Publish or Perish or Google Scholar to calculate this for you. Or you can do so manually by locating citation counts for all published papers and ranking them numerically by the times cited in descending order (see below):

Altmetrics

Altmetrics track web usage as an alternative measure of research impact. This can include abstract views & downloads; blogs & media coverage; social media such as twitter; collections such as Zotero, Mendeley, CiteULike.

Some databases display Altmetrics for articles e.g. BMJ Journals Online, ScienceDirect 

Clinical Trials Registers

Systematic Review Registers

Also see the Library's guide:

WNHS Staff Publications

Go to our searchable Staff Publications guide for links to Full Text where possible:

Let Us Know about your published work and we will add it to Staff Publications!

Over the last decade there has been an increase in new publishers and journals attracting authors who wish to publish Open Access (OA). If you decide to publish in an OA journal, it is important to evaluate the scholarly credibility of the publisher and the journal.

Think. Check. Submit provides guidance on choosing the right journal for your research.

Following are some questions to help assess open access publishers and journals:

  • Are articles from the journal indexed in databases relevant to your field such as Medline, Embase, Emcare or PsycInfo? Or in citation databases such as Web of Science?
  • What is the quality of the articles? See critical appraisal tools. If an article is clearly written by a novice this may indicate a predatory journal.
  • Does the publisher have a clear peer review process and provide details about their peer review panel?
  • Is the publisher a member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)?

 

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a directory of quality peer-reviews open access journals.

The World Association of Medical Editors provide guidance on identifying predatory or pseudo-journals.

 

The following lists have compiled 'potential, possible or probably predatory' journals:

Note: These lists are not comprehensive or authoritative.  They are designed to help authors, but you should conduct your own due diligence to reach your own conclusion.