Looking for cutting edge research ?

Globally governments and universities are seeking to increase access to the research they fund and undertake. This research is being made publicly available free of charge in research repositories (part of the Open Access publishing movement).

Increasingly these repositories are a significant resource discovery tool for researchers wanting to see the latest research in their field.

Repositories are as a rule 'harvested' into Internet search engines so that the content can be searched and discovered. Another way to search repositories is to do so directly at the site or to search a group of them concurrently using a meta-search service.

Here are three services that can help you to find repositories of interest and to search some or all of them concurrently:

ARROW - An Australian service based at the National Library of Australia, providing access to the content of a range of Australian university repositories and research organisations (including The University of Notre Dame Australia)

OpenDOAR - A UK based service which provides access to and searching across over 1300 repositories.

Registry of Open Access Repositories - Another UK based service, which provides access to and information about over 1250 repositories.

Scopus Enhancements

The Scopus database has just had some new features added to the already impressive list of functions:

Journal Analyzer - enables analysis of the performance of journals in relation to citation rates for the articles in the journals

Affiliation Identifier - matches and organisation with all of its indexed research output so we can see who collaborates with us, how many authors affiliate with us, and which subject areas we publish most heavily in

h-Index - a tool to enable evaluation of an author's body of work or a selection of articles

Download manager - a tool for improving the users capacity to manage up to 50 articles simultaneously

Scopus has also recently been chosen as the evaluation tool to be used in conjunction with the Commonwealth Government's Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) programme.

Search Scopus from the Databases + tab in the Library Portal or just click here.

Find out more about ERA here.