Chapter 2: Non-Traditional Research Tools and Tips

This section is concerned with the lessor, non-traditional ways to collect information about your subject topic, your potential journals, and ‘competitor’ intelligence (if you are already a faculty member).

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an excellent resource to get timely research on the topic and variables in your research (e.g. branding, corporate social responsibility, Chinese tourism, etc.). This is an extremely useful tool that can be set up to bring you articles published about your main ideas either daily or weekly to your Google Mail inbox. To do this, following these instructions:

1. Go to google.com/alerts in your browser.
2. Enter a search term for the topic you want to track. ...
3. Choose Show Options to narrow the alert to a specific source, language, and/or region. ...
4. Select Create Alert.

Google Scholar Alerts

Google Scholar, is the world's largest index source which is estimated to have between 125 million and 175 million documents. Additionally, academic publishing is a business and no less so for the advisors and professors within your university system. Their tenure and their bonuses require them to get published and the journals they use to do this are tightly guarded secrets most of the time. However, discovering where they publish is easy now with Google Scholar Alerts (GSA). One very useful technique is to also go to the university staff directories of other universities in your country which offer similar programs. From these directories, create a GSA for each last name of individuals who do similar research.  You can also put your own last name into the system and find how who is referencing you. Here are the steps to set up a GSA:

1. Go to Google Scholar and perform a search for your topic. Learn search tips for Google Scholar.
2. Locate the Create Alert icon. ...
3. You will then see options for your alert. ...
4. Enter your email address in the Email box. ...
5. Click Create Alert.

TIP - Set up GSA on your faculty professors and advisors using only their last names. You can also set scholar alerts to flag the university name abbreviation such as DLSU, KMUTT, or KMITL. This is effective when these abbreviations are used for the faculty emails.

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name. Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.

Google Scholar Articles

Another very useful feature from a Google search is the Scholar Articles that are returned when a search phrase such as ‘education HRM strategy’ is used.  This is also a good place to start in your research.

Elsevier’s Mendeley Stats

Mendeley Stats helps you assess your impact as a researcher. Authors can visit the website to see a detailed breakdown of your Stats by publication, including trends, historical data, and mentions of your work in the media.

Crossref.org

Crossref’s metadata contains 118,875,421 journal articles, books, standards, datasets and more (November 2020). Searches can be conducted on title, authors, DOI’s, ORCIDs, etc. As editors, we use this research tool every day, primarily to verify the author information is correct and find the related paper DOI. Also, you can now login to Crossref using your ORCID.

Academia.edu

According to Wikipedia, Academia.edu is an American commercial social networking website for academics. The website allows its users to create a profile, upload their work(s), and select areas of interest. Then the user can browse the networks of people with similar interests. As of October 2019, Academia.edu claimed just over 99 million users. Although Academia.edu it is not an open access repository per se, the platform can be used by scholars to share papers, monitor readership and paper impacts as measured by Academia.edu's metrics, and for users to follow scholars or research in specific fields. The site was launched in September 2008. We occasionally use Academia’s email suggestions to download papers from their repository. If you say ‘yes’, there will be another link for their ‘premium service’ for a bulk download of similar papers and topics (for a fee). You can also host a personal website on their platform (also for a fee).

Academia Stack Exchange

Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education, which is a good source for topics on topics such as article review times, editorial challenges, and reviewer citation suggestions. This site makes you think!

ResearchGate

It is almost impossible if you are an academic researcher to not have come across ResearchGate as somehow they have managed to get Google to link to their version of a paper first. Once again, a site in which they want you to join and contribute, with them stating they have 16 million members. ResearchGate was founded in 2008 by physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.

 Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN)

Some readers might also be familiar with SSRN (a social sciences and humanities repository with over 911,000 research papers), which joined Mendeley and Elsevier.

Sci-Hub

On 19 November 2020, there were 84,794,279 papers in the Sci-Hub online library.  This site sets off another firestorm of debate concerning research and publishing ethics, but whether you use it or not is of course up to you.

DOAJ

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 22% of which comes from sponsors and 78% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available. DOAJ operates an education and outreach program across the globe, focusing on improving the quality of applications submitted. DOAJ contains 15,615 journals, which contain 5,501389 articles from 123 countries as of 1 December 2020. We think of DOAJ as a form of Beall ‘white list’, with good names instead of bad names (black list). It would be nice if DOAJ rose in stature someday to the same level of acceptance for journal publication as SJR and Scopus indexed journals. However, knowing the way cartels work, it would not surprise me if DOAJ was ‘absorbed’ into one of the large publishing cartel members, as competition is bad for business. (Screen capture from 1 December 2020).

The Master Journal List

The Master Journal List is an invaluable tool to help you to find the right journal for your needs across multiple indices hosted on the Web of Science platform. Spanning all disciplines and regions, Web of Science Core Collection is at the heart of the Web of Science platform and includes only journals that demonstrate high levels of editorial rigor and best practice. You can also search across the following specialty collections: Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Zoological Record, and Current Contents Connect, as well as the Chemical Information products. You can also create a free account to match your manuscript against the database’s 24,000 journals.

Publons (Web of Science)

The simplest way to establish an account with Publons is to use your ORCID ID. After that, you have free access to your author status. Publons is a great way to catalog your academic publishing success.

ADL (Asian Digital Library)

In early 2020 we received an email from an individual with a Science Alert email inviting us to try the ‘ADL’, which was being touted as a free academic search engine being used by “1.8 million users providing access to peer-reviewed literature in the fields of science, technology, and medicine from the Science Alert archives”. As SciAlert is global (or so we thought), we were curious why they chose the word ‘Asian’ to name their database? Subsequently, in December 2020, the following email states they cover nearly 4,594 titles from approximately 1,353 publishers. This is curious for multiple reasons. One is that ADL and SciAlert seem to be the same, how they come up with such huge numbers is beyond us at this time. We also laughed a little bit with the choice of the words ‘nearly; and ‘approximately’ for such exact numbers.