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Research Impact Challenge

This guide will help researchers better understand and manage their online scholarly presence

Day 3: Preserve, Connect, and Share your work with a Digital Repository & Faculty Insight

Welcome to Day 3 of the Clemson Libraries Research Impact Challenge! Today we’ll explore how scholarly digital repositories can help you make all kinds of scholarly work—from article pre-prints to slide decks to syllabi—easier to preserve, share, discover, and cite.

Perhaps you’ve shared article pre-prints or other forms of scholarly work with your colleagues over social media or email, or posted them to your personal website. Using a digital repository can make the common activity of exchanging work with colleagues easier and more stable.

Not all repositories behave exactly the same way, but as a general rule, by depositing work in a repository, you’ll get:

  • A stable URL for the work that you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, etc. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work. You also won’t have to worry about broken links, or about migrating and re-posting your work to a new web page if you move to a new institution, or if your website moves to a new platform.
  • Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others
  • Some form of feedback about how the work has been used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.

There are many different scholarly repositories. Often they are focused on specific disciplines, such as mathematics or biology; or particular communities, such as members of the Modern Language Association or Clemson University faculty.

Faculty Insight

Faculty Insight is a search tool for faculty members to find experts at their institution and targeted funding opportunities. Faculty member profiles are pre-populated with recent activity data sourced from Academic Analytics and Clemson’s research office. This includes articles, books, grants, awards, conference proceedings, and patents. In addition to being able to make corrections and additions to their data, faculty members can also add additional activity not currently captured.
 

Today's challenge:

  1. Choose a repository from the following list (or a different one that you know) and take some time to explore it. Find one item of interest in the repository that you'd like to read, use in your research or teaching, or share with colleagues
  2. Update your Profile in Faculty Insight

Key Scholarly Repositories

ArXiv.org

bioRxiv.org

TigerPrints

  • Who can deposit: Clemson-affiliated faculty and staff; Clemson graduate and undergraduate students with faculty sponsorship
  • What you can deposit: Work produced or sponsored by Clemson affiliates that is educational, artistic, or research-oriented.
  • Create and/or update your TigerPrints author page
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore

Humanities Commons CORE repository

LIS Scholarship Archive

  • Who can deposit: Any library or information science scholar who is a registered Open Science Framework user
  • What you can deposit: “a broad range of scholarship, from [...] metadata to [...] manuscripts. We acknowledge that much of this scholarship happens outside the traditional realms of academia, including work that goes beyond the standard article or book chapter to oral histories, community works, code, data, and more”
  • More information/FAQ
  • Search, browse, and explore

PsycArXiv

SocArXiv

Bonus challenge: Create an account and deposit a piece of your work in an appropriate repository!

What next? 

  • Clemson Faculty: Want to deposit more in TigerPrints, but don’t have time? Contact Kirsten O'Keefe, our library’s repository assistant, to inquire about our TigerPrints deposit service.
  • Check usage/download statistics for anything you’ve deposited to gather information about its use and impact.
  • Keep an eye out for any alerts from Google Scholar indicating that something you deposited has been indexed and added to your Google Scholar profile.      

Learn more: 

Prepare for the next challenge: 

Congratulations! You’ve completed the Day 3 challenge of exploring a digital repository for preserving and sharing your scholarly work!

Tired of online platforms yet? Join us tomorrow, for the Day 4 challenge, where we'll take an inventory of our academic social media use in order to prioritize and make strategic decisions about where to spend time and effort in the coming year.