Transparency in Peer Review: Conference Proceedings

The Peer Review Week 2017 celebrates the importance of peer review in maintaining the quality and accuracy of science. Today we shed light on the Peer Review process in Conference Proceedings. Written by Aliaksandr Birukou Conference Proceedings can be a great format for publishing important and valuable research and communicating new results much faster than journals. Did you know that conference proceedings are not just a simple compilation of conference papers but also go through rigorous, often-times a stricter peer review process? Let’s look at an example. The proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2017, … Read more…

Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature: Marketing

What does it take to get your journal article from submission to publication? How does your book go from a manuscript to a title available at your university library? When your journal partners with Springer Nature for distribution, what steps are taking place to ensure all goes smoothly? We’re answering these questions and more in our new series “Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature.” Learn about the work being done across the company by our dedicated employees from around the world. Today we’re chatting with Divya Laul from our Springer marketing team. What is your position at Springer? I work as … Read more…

How do researchers use social media and scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs)?

Written by: Tina Harseim, Head of Social Media, Springer Nature Gregory Goodey, Research Analyst, Springer Nature Social media is not only a way for authors and publishers to disseminate research findings, it’s also increasingly being used by researchers to discover and read scientific content. To better understand how social media and scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) are used within academia to support research activity, Springer Nature conducted a survey in February. This was in follow up to a Nature survey carried out in 2014. (The original survey can be found here: Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network) Over 3,000 researchers … Read more…

Societies and the Springer Nature experience

We asked Sue Duncan, Technical Editorial Advisor for Hydrogeology Journal, the official journal of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH), what it’s like to work with Springer at the partner level.  Tell us about IAH. What are your mission and values? IAH was founded in 1956 and celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2016. Our mission is to further the understanding, wise use and protection of groundwater resources, primarily to ensure aquifer and ecological sustainability and thus long-term access to safe drinking water. Now with around 4,100 members in over 130 countries, our society has emerged as the leading organisation specialising in … Read more…

Six Tips for the Early Career Researcher

We asked Alex C. Michalos, Emeritus Professor in Political Science from the University of Northern British Columbia, to share advice he would give to scholars standing at the beginning of their careers. Throughout his long, accomplished career he has won many awards, has published 27 books and 118 refereed articles, and founded or co-founded seven scholarly journals including the most frequently cited journal in the world devoted to business ethics, Journal of Business Ethics. He is also the Editor of the 12-volume Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. As researchers I suppose most of us are pretty good … Read more…

Five Things Scientists Should be Doing on Social Media

Sean Ekins is CSO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, CEO of Phoenix Nest, CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and CSO of the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation. In addition, he serves on the Editorial Board of Pharmaceutical Research, and is passionate about using social media to help publicize science. He shared five tips with us for what you can do as a researcher and scientist to help elevate your scientific career.

Beyond the sciences – altmetrics for other disciplines

At Altmetric we’ve always tracked the online attention for items with a scholarly identifier, no matter what subject they might be. Despite this, the majority of the attention we’ve seen to this published research so far tends to be for articles or data relating to public health or scientific breakthroughs. Why is this? Partly, we suspect, it’s because these are matters of broad public interest, and the primary outputs of researchers working in those disciplines tend to be academic articles, which then get then published in a journal, and, if deemed high profile enough, promoted further by the publisher as well as the author(s).

Beyond the article – metrics for other research outputs

In the previous blog post in this series, we briefly talked about how researchers can reap the benefits of making all their research outputs available online. The principle behind this post is to explore the questions around “tracking other outputs” in a little more detail.