Starting Your Research
This guide provides tips on how to:
Explore the Literature
The starting point for any research project always starts with a literature review.
Before you begin any research, think of the points below:
Our literature review guide will:
Head over to finding scholarly literature and other published and unpublished documents across all disciplines.
Once you have established your research topic and search strategy, you can create a list of keywords and use the alert service available in research databases to keep you up to date with new research on your topic – find out more about alerts for researchers.
Tips and tools for managing and organising your research and references are available.
Finding Scholarly Resources
UOW Malaysia KDU Library website contains databases, journals, and books, and includes a wide range of useful open-access content. Make good use of them to find peer-reviewed articles in your field and to identify gaps in the research.
Most subscribed databases provide additional functionality to enable you to:
We also provide document delivery service for articles not available in our Library.
Subject guides
Our subject guides are available to help you find content relevant to your research, with lists of databases for major subject areas in each discipline.
Other Resources
These guides and resources will help you to find materials relevant to your research.
Alerts for Researchers
Setting up alerts allows you to:
Journal Alerts
Keep up with the latest issues of your favourite search or journals by using journal alerts.
Table of contents (TOC) alert is often available via a journal's website. Additionally, you may create a journal alert using a database or TOC portal.
If you create a journal alert in an EBSCO database, you will receive an email notification whenever a new issue of a certain journal becomes available in that database.
The largest free collection of scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs). You can use Journal TOCs to search, browse and follow journals. Click on Help to find out how.
Citation Alerts
Set up an email alert to be alerted when your publication is mentioned.
Managing Your References
Reference management software (also known as "citation managers" or "bibliographic management software") can help you:
There are numerous programs available, so select the one that best meets your requirements.
The library can teach you how to utilise Mendeley to make your research easier.
Copyright
Understanding copyright is critical for reproducing other people's work, such as utilising tables, photos, data, diagrams, and so on.
Any work you make will also be protected by copyright or creative commons licences.
Manage Your Research
Discover how to:
Author Profiles & Identities
Author profiles can be used to demonstrate your affiliation, academic outputs (publications), and research activity.
An accurate, public author profile:
Check your author profile:
Use this table to review and update your author profiles.
| ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) | ORCID | Yes | Author managed | No | Make your ORCID work for you |
| Scopus Author ID | Elsevier | Yes | Automatic import from Scopus | Yes | |
| Google Scholar Profile | Google Scholar | Yes | Author managed | Yes | Google Scholar Profile Set Up |
| Octopus | Octopus (Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)) | Yes | Author managed | No | FAQs |
Research Data Management
Data management activities in research include data collection, organisation, storage, backup, preservation, sharing, archiving, and disposal.
Data created in research initiatives may be stored and retrieved for both present and future usage using good research data management procedures.
Finding Research Data
Use these repositories to find research data.
Google Dataset Search is a Google search engine that assists academics in locating publicly available web data.
An international consortium of more than 750 academic and research institutions.
Find research data repositories for specific disciplines.
Publish Your Research
Discover how to:
Journal Quality
There are numerous journals of various quality available, thus it is critical to select journals intelligently and publish your study in trustworthy sources.
What to consider when choosing a journal.
When selecting a publication to publish your research in, consider the following factors:
Other tools for assessing journals
Key Journal Metrics
| SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) | Uses an algorithm where citations are weighted, based on the prestige of the journal they come from | When a journal is indexed in Scopus Journals in disciplines with higher citation frequency (e.g. Life and Health Sciences) tend to have higher SJR values |
Freely available from SCImago |
| MyCite | Malaysian published journals in the fields of Sciences, Technology, Medicine, Social Sciences and the Humanities. | Malaysian scholarly journals. | Available from MyCite |
Discipline-based Journal Rankings
European quality journal list for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Provides a range of rankings data for Economics, Finance, Accounting, Management, and Marketing journals.
Journal Finder Tools
Paste in your paper's title and/or abstract to match with appropriate journals.
Enter the details of your paper to get suggested journal matches.
Paste details of your abstract to find relevant Open Access journals.
Finds recommended IEEE publications based on keywords from your paper.
Journal/Author Name Estimator. Compare your paper's title and/or abstract with millions of others in PubMed to find matching articles, authors and journals.
Books and Conferences
Choosing a Book Publisher
The book publisher you select is determined by the sort of book you are publishing.
When choosing a book publisher:
Useful links:
Choosing a Conference
Conferences present opportunities to:
Considering presenting your research at a conference?
Check:
Useful links for finding and assessing conferences:
Listings for over 100,000 conferences, conventions, trade shows, exhibits, expos and seminars from a wide range of disciplines.
Lists conferences by topic and country. You can set up conference alerts and link to conference websites.
Explore international conferences, workshops, exhibitions, and fairs.
A summary of genuine versus predatory conferences, followed by indicators that a conference or conference organiser may be predatory.
IEEE sponsors more than 1,800 annual conferences and events worldwide.
Discoverability & Open Access
Discoverability
How to improve the discoverability of your study:
Open Access Publishing
Repositories
You can deposit your research in a variety of Open Access repositories, including:
Subject repositories
Repository directory
Open Access publishing
Finding Open Access journals
Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving information
Finding Open Access books
Open Access models
There are three main Open Access models, some of which attract fees:
Useful links:
How to Get an ISBN or ISSN for Your Publication
What are ISBNs & ISSNs?
ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) and ISSNs (International Standard Serial Numbers) are unique bibliographic reference numbers used to identify individual books, journals, multimedia and other published materials.
For example:
Book – The KDU story : droplet to ocean., ISBN: 9789834395612
Journal – Illawarra Unity, ISSN: 1327-8126
Get an ISBN for Your Publication
Applying for an ISBN from National Library of Malaysia (PNM)
Research Impact
Discover how to:
Citation-based Metrics
Scholarly Impact
Measure your scholarly impact using citation-based metrics such as:
Use the Measuring Your Research Impact (MyRI) tutorial to understand and use citation-based metrics to benefit your research.
Key Citation-based Metrics
| Citation count | Number of times a publication has been cited by another research | Google Scholar Dimensions |
Google Scholar Dimensions |
| h-index | An h-index of five means that an author has five publications that have been cited at least five times Note: should only compare within same discipline and career-stage |
Google Scholar | Google Scholar |
| Citations per paper | Total number of citations divided by total number of publications | Dimensions | |
| Journal metrics | Journal citation-based measures such as Impact Factor, CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) etc. Note: measures the impact of journals, not individual articles |
See Journal quality section for more information |
Alternative Metrics
Alternative metrics indicate the number of times a research output has been shared, discussed, or downloaded through online sources such as social networking sites, blogs, mainstream media, and reference managers. When compared to standard metrics, this data accumulates at a quicker rate.
Alternative metrics:
If your research is available through Open Access, it's more likely to have alternative metrics through web sources.
Alternative metrics supplement typical citation-based measures and can be beneficial in subjects such as the humanities and social sciences, where traditional metrics may not be available or as valuable for demonstrating influence.
Other Tools:
Access to data for any publication with a DOI.
Free site where researchers join with their Twitter account and explore and see the online reach of their research.
Monitors and provides analytics of public mentions of work in social networks and on the web.
Find International Library holdings of your books.
Research Engagement and Increase Your Impact
Research impact is the contribution that research makes to the economy, society and environment, beyond the contribution to academic research (EI 2018 Framework).
Publish free and accessible versions of your work. This will boost the significance of your research because:
Contact PGRC (discovery@kdu.edu.my) for information on managing your publications. See discoverability and Open Access for how to make your research more discoverable.
Make your research data publicly available so you can:
Manage Your Name
Manage your author profiles and identities so all your research outputs are discoverable under the one name.
It is also critical to use the same spelling or form of your name in all published and unpublished research results.
Find the Right Journal for Your Article
Find journals that will maximise the impact of your research.
See journal quality and journal finder tools to learn how.
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