Website of the Month for November - Our World in Data

This month's website of choice is Our World in Data which provides access to over 3000 charts across almost 300 topics. All of the charts are Open Access and Open Source, so plenty for you to explore and play with. If you want to find out more about the website, go to https://ourworldindata.org/about

https://ourworldindata.org/

Here's the DALY's rate from all causes for you to play with.

Website of the month for August - Smoking and Smoking Cessation in England: Data Monitoring Tool

This month's 'website of the month' is a useful monitoring tool to collate the available data on key outcomes, such as smoking prevalence and quit attempts; the data was collected from a range of national data sources. 

The site says:

"This tool will be a ‘one-stop shop’ for information on smoking related measures and allows the general public, researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders to get an overview of trends both in the overall population, and in target groups such as the relatively disadvantaged."

https://ukctas.net/PRP/tool.html

"Highcharts is a product that was created by the Norway-based company, Highsoft. Highcharts was released in 2009, and it is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, so will work on all smart phones, tablets and computers. Highcharts is being used around the world for researchers to show their research in an innovative and dynamic fashion."

https://ukctas.net/PRP/tool.html

https://ukctas.net/featured-projects/NIHR-PRP.html

HEDS Website of the Month - Scite

This month's HEDS recommended website is Scite which helps you check whether a scientific paper has been supported or contradicted. Scite uses machine learning to scan hundreds of thousands of scientific papers and classifies them by whether they support, contradict or just mention the papers they are citing.

https://scite.ai/

When a paper is analysed they are added to the Scite database which makes them searchable on the platform. You can use the tool via the website or using Scite's Chrome browser plugin.  

https://scite.ai/

HEDS Website of the month for June - Get The Research

We've chosen ImpactStory's latest venture 'Get The Research' search engine that helps you 'find and understand peer-reviewed research papers'.
Get The Research is in an early release version and specialises in research in biology and medicine (papers indexed by PubMed) -- this will be widened further in the future. All of the research on Get The Research appears in academic research journals, and the vast majority of this content is peer reviewed. 

https://gettheresearch.org/

Get The Research flags each article with its "level of evidence" when we know it -- is the article just a report about a single patient (a "case study") or a more trustworthy analysis combining the results of many studies (a "meta-analysis")? Click on the tags above the article titles to learn more. They rank articles with higher levels of evidence higher in the search results to make these easier to find. Reading the news studies about a paper (linked to from the "Learn More" page when they've found news articles) is a great way to find out what others think about the results.

Get The Research is funded by the support of Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

This is a very early release, and so feedback is really valuable, you can contact the team@impactstory.org

Website of the month for April - The Pedagogy of Methodological Learning

The latest website of the month on our Blog has been selected by HEDS colleague and information specialist Dr Helen Buckley-Woods. Helen has suggested 'The Pedagogy of Methodological Learning' website. Their website states:

The pedagogy of methodological learning is a three-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of a package of research by the National Centre for Research Methods. It is intended to promote pedagogical development for advanced social science research methods.

The pedagogy of methodological learning website

Advanced research requires a unique combination of theoretical understanding, procedural knowledge and skills competence; nonetheless, there has been little research about pedagogy associated with this. In the UK, doctoral researchers have learned through an apprenticeship model of supervision, with taught courses and formal training becoming a more recent requirement. Subsequent capacity building has focused on the incorporation of core and advanced training tailored toward the professional and methodological development of researchers. The lack of ‘pedagogic culture’, i.e. lack of debate, investigation and evaluation regarding how research methods are taught and learned is problematic. Little is understood about how best to respond to the distinctive pedagogical challenges in this field.

This research seeks to:
advance an emerging pedagogical culture and content knowledge for social science research methods teaching;
create a typology of pedagogical approaches for social research methods teaching to inform national policy and practice;
develop a coherent theoretical framework for methods teaching to inform national practice.

HEDS Website of the Month for February - The Chartmaker Directory

HEDS Colin Angus picked last month's website of the month and he's come up trumps again with another useful resource with The Chartmaker Directory

http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/

For those moments when you have seen a type of chart somewhere and want to recreate it, but aren't exactly sure how. The Chartmaker directory website is a simple matrix with software packages/websites along the top, and different chart types down the side. Each cell is populated with links to reproducible examples, code or how-to guides to make that chart type in that software package. 

http://chartmaker.visualisingdata.com/

So if you want to know how to coax Excel into drawing a heatmap, draw a Sankey diagram in Google Sheets, show maps in Stata (who knew you could do that?), or draw a lollipop chart in R, then this website will show you a link to do just that. It also gives you an idea of when the software you want to use just can't be bullied into making the graph you want, which is always useful to know.