Best

Using search engines effectively is now a key skill for researchers, but could more be done to equip young researchers with the tools they need. Here, Dr Neil Jacobs and Rachel Bruce from Jisc’s digital infrastructure team share their top ten resources for researchers from across the web.

 

The power of Google - ready for a surprise?

Google can do maths too. See what happens when you try.

 

Paul Stokes, Jisc’s programme manager for technical directions says: “Not many people know about Google picture search. Drag and drop a picture onto the images search to find similar images.”

 

If you want to find out more about how to use Google effectively, Paul recommends power searching with Google.

 

Delving for data?

Searching for research data is not yet easy. Dr Neil Jacobs says: “Researchers probably start with the disciplinary repositories with which they’re familiar, although there are some catalogues of different collections of data.”

 

These catalogues include:

1. In Australia there is a registry in Research Data Australia
2. For environmental data, there is the NERC Data Catalogue Service
3. Public data is searchable in the European Union Open Data Portal
4. Particular software platforms also have their own searches, eg Dryad, which is specifically for data, and FigShare, which contains some data, but also researchers’ other items such as PowerPoint slides and images.

Via Nik Peachey