Newcomers Research Week is organised once a year - in January - and offers early career researchers and new starters at Essex bite size sessions as introductions to the research support offered at the University of Essex.
We repeat many of the essential sessions each Research Week, but we also introduce or change some sessions based on the feedback and suggestions we get from participants throughout the Newcomers Research Weeks.
The Newcomers Research Week has sessions that map to the research lifecycle; from ideas to grant writing to publication and sharing. Sessions are delivered by staff from the UK Data Archive, Research and Enterprise Office, the Library Services, CER, and others.
Below is the programme for Newcomers Research Week for January 2021. These sessions will all be delivered via Zoom, and booking will be available soon.
Information about previous research weeks can be seen here.
As we won't be able to chat between sessions this year, look out for our two social events in the programme!
Coffee catch-up and quiz: Wednesday 13th, 2:30pm-3pm
The Open Access Mystery: Thursday 14th, 3pm-4pm - Unfortunately this session has had to be cancelled. Apologies for any inconvenience.
This session will focus on developing an effective search strategy, and will consider how you can structure searches to achieve the best results when undertaking a comprehensive literature review. It will also look at evaluating potential sources as an intrinsic part of the literature review.
Does your research involve human participants? This means your research will require ethical approval. Do you know the difference between types of consent, for example for research participation and for data protection? How much do you know about the role of informed consent in data sharing and reuse, ethically and legally? Do you plan to publish your data for future reuse? This session will explain the difference between types of consent and how as a researcher you can consider consent for data archiving and future reuse in the consent process, considering one-off and process consent, and the wording to use. We will evaluate consent forms researchers have used in practice, and discuss the model consent form the UK Data Services advocates.
If you intend to undertake research with human participants, including personal data, opinions and records, you will need a favourable ethical opinion before your research can commence. This session will guide you through the process of writing an application for ethical approval and highlight the common pitfalls.
Twitter can be a great way to follow trends, build-up networks, start-up conversations and promote your work. Find out how to get started, discover tips from colleagues at Essex and look at different strategies for promoting your activity on Twitter.
This online session will go through some of the basics of the publishing process including:
How to find a good journal to publish in
The Peer Review Process
It will also mention potential ‘dangers’ of publishing like Predatory Publishers and Citation Cartels and the participants will learn how to avoid these. There will be time for questions, and the session will end with a quiz!
Open access (OA) means making research publications freely available so anyone can benefit from reading and using them. Making your research open access is required by many research funders and is also necessary for eligibility for the next REF.
This introduction to Open Access will give you an overview of what open access is and how you can make your work open access to increase visibility.We will also go through the current publishing environment and how open access fits within current funder requirements and the REF.
Managing your online identity as a researcher has never been more important as several funders, organisations and even journals include information from online profiles as supporting evidence in successful applications or as digital identifiers to separate you from others (especially if you have a common name).
This session will explore several online platforms for researchers including
At the end of this session you will know how to set up your profile and manage your identity on the different platforms. You will also know about the benefits of engaging with the different profiles, what the University of Essex’s requirements are and how to use our internal Research Information System (RIS) to monitor your grants, publications and research & teaching activities.
Open science has been a buzzword for a while now, but what it actually entails and how we can ensure out research outputs meet these standards? By planning and implementing sound data management practices.
This session will cover essentials of data management and open science. What do we need to be aware of if we use, collect or plan to publish our research outputs, be they articles, data, code or other.
This session will cover how to search Google and Google Scholar effectively. Whilst caution is often given to the merits of using Google for academic research, there exists an increasing amount of legitimate information that can be accessed via search engines. The challenge is being able to find this information amongst the huge number of results that a search returns.
This session will look at how you can target and filter your search results to access the most relevant research. You will gain an understanding of how different search engines work and how you can use advanced search techniques to refine your searches to return focused results.
Blogging can be a great way to encourage engagement with your research. The University has a partnership with the news website The Conversation and has also launched a new blogging platform. So how do you get started? What makes a great blog? How do pitch your ideas to The Conversation? How do you promote it once you’ve written it?
This webinar shows researcher how to use the UKDS Catalogue to access and order data and highlights the various data we hold and other analysis tools we offer.
Citations are frequently used in Higher Education as a way of measuring and monitoring research performance. This session will explore the benefits and limitations of citations and how they are used. It will also explore ways researchers can increase their visibility and reach more academic audiences. At the end of the session there will be time for questions.
Research integrity is about ensuring research is conducted in a way that ensures others can have confidence in the methods and findings of the research. The session considers the key elements of research integrity and what to do if research misconduct is suspected.
Numerous funding resources are available for international research projects, yet there are various challenges to finding out about these resources and successfully obtaining funding. Presenters in this webinar will discuss various international funding opportunities, the role of the foreign component in a successfully funded research grant, potential administrative issues and managing projects across different physical (time zones) and cultural perspectives. The workshop will be facilitated by Dr Beate Knight, the University’s Research Development Manager for international collaborations, who will be joined by academic researchers from the Science&Health (Dr. Javier Andreu) and Humanities (Dr. Lisa Blackmore) faculties. Javier and Lisa will discuss their insights and experiences from bidding for and working on international research projects.
In this hands-on introductory course we will explore the essentials of grant writing. What makes a well written application? Working with ‘real life’ grant examples, we will identify basic principles of constructing a well written grant application and will cover top tips to help increase your chances of grant writing success.
This informal coffee catch-up with a fun quiz gives Newcomers Research Week attendees and presenters a chance to interact with each other in a less formal setting. A small prize will be on offer for the winner of the quiz! We hope to see as many of you there as possible to meet and chat, as we won't be able to gather together over coffee between sessions this year.
Reference management software helps you to create and manage your lists of references for research projects, and it can potentially save you a lot of time! This session will introduce you to some of the available tools – including Zotero and Mendeley – and give you the opportunity to try at least one of them for yourself.
This session is aimed at PhD students coming toward the end of their doctoral studies. The webinar will focus primarily on postgraduate fellowship opportunities on Health and Science and examine the priorities and eligibility criteria of a range of funders. We will also consider what constitutes good practice and discuss the various elements necessary for producing a competitive application.
This session is aimed at PhD students coming toward the end of their doctoral studies. The workshop/webinar will focus primarily on postgraduate fellowship opportunities and examine the priorities and eligibility criteria of a range of funders. We will also consider what constitutes good practice and discuss the various elements necessary for producing a competitive application.
Interested in using quantitative or qualitative data in your research but not sure how to get started? This session will guide you through choosing the right type of data for your project, getting to know your data by understanding its structure and exploring its content, and learning how to get started with initial exploratory analysis. This session will be delivered by Dr Deb Wiltshire and Dr Maureen Haaker from the UK Data Service and will be a mixture of online presentations and demonstrations using SPSS and NVivo.
High quality research is underpinned by a good foundational understanding of the data. There is a vast array of data sources available to researchers and students in the UK, and many data sources can be complex. Choosing the most suitable data source and getting to know the data’s structure can be daunting for those new to data and data analysis. This session aims to demonstrate how to approach finding data, exploring a new data source and beginning initial analyses, and will include lots of hints and tips to make this process easier and more effective.
This session is suitable for anyone who is new to quantitative or qualitative data or who is looking to gain more confidence in working with data. This session is also suitable for researchers or students who are collecting their own data and those who are using existing data sources.
This session will introduce attendees to copyright, focusing on copyright considerations in both publishing and teaching. By the end of the session, attendees will have a better understanding of different terms and licences available for publishing in different formats, and will be familiar with the blanket copyright licences that the University of Essex operates under for teaching. Furthermore, common copyright questions will be addressed, and the importance of appreciating the situation-dependent nature of copyright will be highlighted.
Recent years has seen an increase in calls for openness and sharing in research. GDPR and the proliferation of open access repositories, as well as concerns about how data has been used to inform policies, have all raised public awareness of this drive. In 2007, OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding declared data as a public good, prompting a swathe of action. Now, funders, professional societies and journals are asking researchers to deposit data in an appropriate data repository. Within quantitative research, the infrastructure to facilitate this transparency is well-established an accepted; the complexities of nature of qualitative research, however, has largely left challenges for researchers trying to do the same with qualitative data.
Data sharing ideology promotes value for money through more and subsequent analysis of data; opportunities for collaboration and comparison; and research validation. Looking at archived, qualitative datasets, we can glean lessons about the good practices to help foster transparency and take advantage of these benefits. This session will include a summary of the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in research and present case studies and examples of how qualitative researchers have demonstrated transparency in their research. By critically engaging in discussions of how transparency can be facilitated within qualitative research, we will explore what realistic expectations for what open research in qualitative research looks like.
Unfortunately this session has had to be cancelled. Apologies for any inconvenience.
The University of Essex’s staff and students have access to SciVal, a tool that provides access to research analytics data. Used in the right context SciVal can help you address the following: • Supporting the research narrative with bibliometric analyses in a funding application or for evaluation reports • Tracking research publication • Mapping the relevant research landscape - identify collaborators, potential reviewers of grant proposals - including research contributing to the UN’s SDGs • Developing a research consortium for a grant application - find the right academic and corporate partners • Demonstrate secondary impact by analyzing citing publications - in a few clicks get a comprehensive overview of your publications’ reach and how additional research builds upon your findings Research analytics provide insight into important patterns and trends within different research domains. In the upcoming training session you can learn how SciVal gives you access to publication, citation, and collaboration data you can use to your benefit.
This training session is aimed at early-career researchers, but would be useful for any academic researcher or postgraduate student wishing to access sensitive data sources within a secure data enviornment (e.g. the UK Data Service Secure Lab, the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service, etc.).
The session will give an introduction to the UK Data Service Secure Lab, in particular, and to secure data environments, in general; their philosophy, access and use conditions; and the resources and support available from the UK Data Service. We will cover the 5 Safes Framework, how to apply to access these data, options for importing and linking data, and access to international controlled microdata via our involvement in the International Data Access Network (IDAN).
This session will give you an overview of what Knowledge Exchange (KE) is, why it is important for the university to commercialise some of its research and our policies for it. This will include an overview of and specific KE programmes for academic / industry collaborations. You will be given examples of projects the University of Essex has delivered. You will also find out about the support for KE you can access from the Research & Enterprise Office.
Building impact into your research requires you to have a clear understanding of what impact is and how to integrate impact practices into the research process. This introductory course provides an insight into research impact with a focus on how impact can be planned for, generated, and evidenced.
Do you want to reach new audiences, join wider debates about your areas of expertise and inspire the next generation of researchers in your field? If so, engaging with the media is probably just what you're looking for.
Media engagement offers researchers opportunities to promote their latest research, and the exposure could mean more people read your research papers.
Most research grants require you to write a summary. The summary may be the hardest part of the grant proposal to write because it demands completeness and brevity and capturing the reader’s attention. You must explain the main aims, objectives and importance of the proposal as simply as possible. At the same time, you must make it interesting to read, so that your proposal will stand out from all the others a reviewer might see on a typical day. Proposal summaries need to also be written using non-technical language so that they can be understood by general audiences.
In this session we will consider what makes an effective summary, and will review a range of proposal summaries.
