Research Classification

As part of our ‘Engage’ project here at the University of Glasgow we have been looking at using research themes to facilitate discovery of information about research projects and thier outputs.

For the ‘Engage’ project we imported the list of RCUK research classifications to our demonstrator.

The IRIOS2 demonstrator illustrates we can obtain the Research Council classification and award data as an export from the Research Council systems and potentially use them as a basis for our ‘theme’ classification albeit we ‘only’ get classfications for some Research Council’s at present and not all RC’s or all funders.  This is a good potential base that could remove a portion of the data entry and be developed to facilitate assignation of standard research themes to all of our projects (and their outputs).

For this to work I think we’d need a robust central reference point of the Research Council themes (or  a standard UK/wider community set of themes).  The current IRIOS2 demonstrator include a number of other classifications which might be of use – e.g. FRASCATI, Eurostat 2007 NABS.

example of grant data in IRIOS2 demonstrator

In addition IRIOS2 provides some good potential for cross-institutional collaboration ideas – simply using the Research Council themes – or potentially applying fuzzy logic and other ideas such as those we have developed in our Engage project for ‘internal’ and ‘external’ use.

Potentially in future we could get an electronic update of new awards with relevant info that we export into our systems (complete with Research Council classification where available).  This would cut out manual keying from award letters/emails, speed up process, improve synchronisation, and facilitates use of research themes for discovery of the activities and outputs.

Open Repositories Conference 2012

We ‘re-used’ our ‘Engage’ poster http://researchclusters.wordpress.com from the ARMA conference duly updated with additional information for the audience at OR2012.

We got to do a short sales pitch on our poster and I tweeted the link to our blog with the conference hash tag #OR2012 for those interested who could not make the poster reception.

After the two hour poster reception the posters were on display throughout the conference. We provided handouts and information on all of our current JISC projects Cerif for Datasets, Cerif in Action, IRIOS2 and Encapsulate. We ran out of some of them.

I spoke to some – but not all of the 460 or so delegates as well as noting contact details and exchanging information of relevance with other authors of over 60 poster.

There are some very interesting links to all of our projects (see my forthcoming blog entry on C4D, Engage and CiA projects for relevant comments).

http://researchclusters.wordpress.com

http://cerif4datasets.wordpress.com/

http://cerifinaction.wordpress.com/

http://academicexpertise.wordpress.com/

Impact and Research Methodology

A post regarding impact and research methodology that may be of interest – see our Engage project blog: http://researchclusters.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/some-interesting-points-from-our-team-discussion-today/

In particular I am interested to hear from IRIOS2 colleagues if research methodology ‘classification’ might be available with data supplied by RCUK, and from the research organisations as to whether this would be of use to them.  Not necessarily for the current project – just in general.

 

Classification of Research Activity

At our recent steering group meeting we discussed the information available from Research Council Systems in relation to awards they have made to Research Organisations.  It was suggested we might be able to make use of the classification that is used to sub-divide the activity into types and sub-types for example:

 Parallel Computing

Literary & Cultural Theory

Remote Sensing & Earth Obs

We have already used the Research Council classifications for another JISC funded project ‘Engage’ which is running under the Business Intelligence programme. You may be interested in the post on the blog.  The version of the classification we used is available there for download:

http://researchclusters.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/choosing-a-research-classification-scheme/

Feel free to comment here on the IRIOS2 blog or on the Engage blog as the two projects will share any information received.

Research Output Discussion Group

A few of us from Scottish Universities got together informally yesterday to discuss research output management and I thought others might be interested in sharing what was discussed.

Anna Clements from St. Andrews gave an update and demo of their research information system.

Matt Barr, Andrew McHugh, and myself gave an update on the Engage project http://researchclusters.wordpress.com/   James Toon mentioned some useful topic work at Edinburgh that we can link in with.

Anna and myself gave overviews of the following projects:

IRIOS2 https://irios2.wordpress.com/ 

CERIF in Action http://cerifinaction.wordpress.com/

CERIF For Data http://cerif4datasets.wordpress.com/

Discussion points included:

• Unfunded projects – some HEI’s add these to their systems, other don’t.   How to encourage submission of these activities if there is not a funding incentive.
• Monitoring application success rates done to varying degrees with various approaches.
• Anna used Community of Science activities as basis  for categorising activities and will be doing further work on defining activities in future.  
• The Engage project has been using the RCUK classifications as a basis for mapping research activity.
• Keywords on outputs are not generally regarded as successful with greater confidence in data mining from project and output titles and content.
• Levels of data verification vary and most felt that although this can be resource intensive more should be done to improve the quality of data whether through further automation, staff training, or other means.  One method that has been in use at the University of Glasgow for many years is automatic emails.  http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/researchandenterprise/forstaff/researchsystemandprocesses/researchsystem/automaticemails/
• Some core systems record research activity from students and some do not.  
• We spoke about the potential for confidential information such as HR information or IP to be exposed via narrative fields in the RCUK Outcomes System.  We are confident that our colleagues at RCUK will ensure that data is secure and nothing inappropriate is made public but nevertheless felt we needed to manage this locally through training, communication and data checking to minimise the possibility of inappropriate comments being transferred to third parties.  We discussed how the University of Glasgow defaults publicity to ‘Yes’ for certain award types.   More details are available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/researchandenterprise/forstaff/researchsystemandprocesses/postawardadvice/publicityflagonpaf/#d.en.105179 
• Definitions and terminology vary widely across the stakeholders and we look forward to the outcome of various projects that are working on proposals for standardisation.  There is a useful presentation on the benchmarking project ‘Snowball’ at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/en/groups/cisg/Events/2011/cisg2011/~/media/groups/cisg/events/2011/CISG/CISG2011_06_Lisa_Colledge.ashx
• We discussed the different definitions and requirements of recording events and agreed this area needed further clarification. 
• The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information  http://casrai.org/http://casrai.org/ may be of interest.  Some people have already had a demo and we plan to organise a discussion and demo for others.

We thought it was very useful and we may meet up again in the Spring.  Any comments welcome.