Website of the month for August - Altmetric Bookmarklet for Researchers

Not so much a website this month but a snazzy little plug in for researchers and librarians among other research professionals that helps you find out how much attention a research publication has received. This little tool has been around for quite a while and is simple to use and can provide insights on whether your paper has been mentioned in the media, in Wikipedia or across social media platforms like Twitter.

You can obtain the web extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari here 

https://www.altmetric.com/products/free-tools/bookmarklet/

More information from Altmetric.com

• The Bookmarklet only works on PubMed, arXiv or pages containing a DOI with Google Scholar friendly citation metadata
• Twitter mentions are only available for articles published since July 2011
• You can request support for a particular journal by asking @altmetric for it on Twitter
• Are you a publisher? Don’t use this bookmarklet! We have much better tools for you, just get in touch.

Website of the Month for January - Lens.Org

This month's website is one that has just appeared on our eye line called Lens.org. Looking similar to Digital Science's Dimensions platform. Lens.org is another in the growing number of academic intelligence and analytics databases.

Lens.org

Lens.org key functions include

Patent Search and Analysis
Patent search capabilities offer advanced boolean functions, structured search, biological search, classification search, filtering and sorting options to find the most relevant and important patents.

Discover Experts & Collaborators
Explore which scholarly works have influenced what patents and who is using scholarly work to build products and services. Dynamic and interrogable, identify and visualise important linkages and explore networks of collaborations, leading to better partnerships and delivering outcomes of value.

Collections, Portfolios and Reports
Create, annotate and share collections of your patent and scholarship portfolio. Create and publish collections of patents or scholarship, explore these collections to understand who does what, when and where, who influences whom: to inform decision-making for partnering, for investing or for research trajectories.

Lens.org collaborates with established Open Access platforms including ORCiD, PubMed, Microsoft Academic, Crossref, DOAJ, PMC, Unpaywall, CORE among others.

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 October - RAW Graphs

This month's website is a really useful one for those wanting to turn their dull, grey spreadsheets into engaging data visualisations. RAW Graphs is an open source data visualisation tool that creates a visual representation of complex data so that it is easy for everyone to digest.

https://rawgraphs.io/

RAW Graphs say: "Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW Graphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch)."

"The project, led and maintained by the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) was released publicly in 2013 and is regarded by many as one of the most important tools in the field of data visualisation."

Website of the month September - Statchecker

This may be of interest to just a few of you who may work and collaborate on psychological research (such as with the Department of Work Psychology), but I think it's worth sharing wider. 

http://statcheck.io/ 

Statcheck is a program that checks for errors in statistical reporting in APA-formatted documents. It was originally written in the R programming language. Statcheck/web is a web-based implementation of statcheck. Using statcheck/web, you can check any PDF for statistical errors without installing the R programming language on your computer. To use statcheck/web, simply upload a PDF or HTML file of your APA-formatted document. The output will identify any errors in statistical reporting that can be identified. (For a summary of what statcheck can and cannot do, see the statcheck manual. Please note, as said before, this only works with APA-formatted papers.

http://statcheck.io/

We contacted the creator of the package to ask whether other styles (Harvard etc) would be added and think something might be developed in time. There is a blog post on the LSE Impact Blog which explains more. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/02/28/statcheck-a-spellchecker-for-statistics/

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.

Website of the month - Ask for Evidence

This month's website of the month is Ask for Evidence http://askforevidence.org/index

According to their website, Ask for Evidence is a public campaign that helps people request for themselves the evidence behind news stories, marketing claims and policies.

We hear daily claims about what is good for our health, bad for the environment, how to improve education, cut crime, treat disease or improve agriculture. Some are based on reliable evidence and scientific rigour. Many are not.

Ask for Evidence isn’t about leading an ‘evidence-based life’; it is about holding powerful figures to account and not having the wool pulled over our eyes on important issues. It is making sure that a discussion of the evidence is happening when it really matters. That might be when a public figure or authority makes a claim or decision on our behalf; or when public money or our health or safety is at stake.

Ask for Evidence is supported by hundreds of public figures, organisations and thousands of supporters such as Mumsnet, NHS Behind the Headlines and the Royal Statistical Society. The campaign has received core funding from The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and this website was built thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust.

http://askforevidence.org/index

Ask for Evidence was launched by Sense about Science in 2011. Sense about Science is a charity that helps people to make sense of science and evidence and promote use of evidence in public life. This takes us from responding to outlandish diet claims by celebrities to helping parents understand vaccines, from working with people with chronic diseases to beat misleading ‘cure’ claims on the Internet to pressing for sound use of statistics in media reporting.

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.  

Website of the month - The PEDE Project

December's website of the month comes from the PEDE Project which is a a huge database of over 2,000 paediatric economic evaluations that have been published over the past 30 years. It also includes an inventory of health state utility weights reported in cost-utility analyses.

The PEDE database 

They also have The PEDE research program which is focused on identifying trends in publication, developing tools for quality appraisal, and addressing the challenges surrounding health state valuation in children.

Project - Methods for the conduct of economic evaluations have evolved over time to improve the quality of evidence for allocation decisions. However, child health differs from adult health in important ways. As a result, there are aspects to the measurement of costs and consequences that are unique to the paediatric population.

The goal of the Paediatric Economic Database Evaluation (PEDE) Project is to provide tools and promote research to advance the field of child health economic evaluation.

http://pede.ccb.sickkids.ca/pede/index.jsp

Website of the Month for November - Trip Search Engine

For November's Website of the Month we have chosen the excellent Trip Search Engine

Trip is a clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care. Trip has been online since 1997 and in that time has developed into the internet’s premier source of evidence-based content. Their motto is ‘Find evidence fast’ and this is something they aim to deliver for every single search.

As well as research evidence they also allow clinicians to search across other content types including images, videos, patient information leaflets, educational courses and news.

They also include the PICO search tool which allows you to search for research in relation to their four criteria of Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome. 

For further information on Trip you can visit their website here
https://www.tripdatabase.com 

If you have questions please contact Trip via jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com

https://www.tripdatabase.com/

Website of the month for October - Directory of Open Access Journals

For this month's HEDS Website of the Month it seemed quite fitting to go with an Open Access site given it is Open Access Week. 

https://doaj.org/

The DOAJ website says:
"The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

DOAJ is a membership organisation and membership is available in 3 main categories: Publisher, Ordinary Member and Sponsor. A DOAJ Membership is a clear statement of intent and proves a commitment to quality, peer-reviewed open access. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Principles) and DOAJ members are expected to follow these principles as a condition of membership. DOAJ reserves the right to reject applications for membership, or revoke membership if a member or sponsor is found to contravene the Principles. Read more about membership here.

DOAJ is a community-curated list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. To assist libraries and indexers keep their lists up-to-date, we make public a list of journals that have been accepted into or removed from DOAJ but we will not discuss specific details of an application with anyone apart from the applicant. Neither will we discuss individual publishers or applications with members of the public unless we believe that, by doing so, we will be making a positive contribution to the open access community.

DOAJ's Mission

DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone."

Website of the Month - Error Statistics Philosophy

This month's recommended website of the month was suggested by our own Dr John Stevens who is the Director of the Centre for Bayesian Statistics in Health Economics (CHEBS). 

https://errorstatistics.com/

Dr Stevens suggests you pop over to the Error Statistics Philosophy" blog. The site is managed by Deborah May with lots of contributions from professor Stephen Senn from ScHARR's Design, Trails and Statistics section. 

https://errorstatistics.com/

Website of the Month - Open Access Button

Open Access Button is exactly that, it is a button you click through your browser to find legal Open Access versions of research publications that may otherwise sit behind a paywall. It is a way of opening up research to global audiences that can have a positive effect on the world, especially when we think about health research. 

Open Access Button

The website says:

"We urgently need trusted knowledge that’s fairly owned, created, and read. We’re addressing that by creating a family of library-aligned, open source tools built not-for-profit, but for-change. Our tools make it simpler to do research without subscriptions.

The project started when students got tired of hitting paywalls. Instead of accepting their frustration, they became inspired and took an idea to track the impact of paywalls to a hackday. The Open Access Button was launched in November 2013."

Open Access Button

ScHARR Library Information Officer Sheldon Korpet said about the tool. 

"Open Access Button is a website which searches aggregate research repositories (like core.ac.uk) for journal articles that are free and legal to read. Simply paste the URL of the article you can't access and search to see if OA Button can find an open access version to read instantly. If the article isn't available OA Button ask the author to put a copy in a repository, so the tool only gets better with more users and searches." - Sheldon, Information Officer, ScHARR Library

Website of the month - Mt Hood Diabetes Challenge Network

This month's Website of the Month was recommended by our own Dan Pollard. Dan said he occasionally uses the Mt Hood Diabetes Challenge website (https://www.mthooddiabeteschallenge.com/). 

Mt Diabetes Challenge

Dan says that the resources section of the website is very useful for things to use in any modelling of diabetes. This section contains useful data for diabetes modelling, a registry of diabetes models (which I still need to properly engage with) and a list of applied cost-effectiveness analyses in the topic area of diabetes. It also has a news section, which mainly covers new publications in the area of the health economics of diabetes. 

Website of the Month - Office of Health Economics News Site

This month's useful web resource is the news pages for the Office of Health Economics. The news site is updated weekly and provides information on upcoming seminars, new papers and other information of interest to the health economist environment.

© OHE.org

About the OHE
OHE provides authoritative resources, research and analyses in health economics, health policy and health statistics both through our independent research and in our consultancy. Our work informs decision making about health care and pharmaceutical issues at the UK, regional and international levels.

https://www.ohe.org/news

Website of the Month - ISPOR International Digest of Databases

This month's website is the ISPOR International Digest of Databases. 

© ISPOR

Taken from the site:

"The International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) has developed an electronic index (digest) of 400 databases from 45 countries.  The Digest consists of key attributes of health care databases. It is grouped by country and allows both key word searches and searches by type of database.

The Digest is an invaluable source of information for health care outcomes researchers around the world.  This information is also very useful to health care decision makers, clinicians, and ultimately, patients.

If your organization has a health care database that could be included in the ISPOR International Digest of Databases, please complete the questionnaire at: Health Care Database Key Attributes Questionnaire."

https://www.ispor.org/DigestOfIntDB/CountryList.aspx

Website of the Month - The Academic Health Economists' Blog

In the second of our new monthly feature, we pick a useful website that readers of this blog will find of interest. This month we have chosen The Academic Health Economists' Blog.  

https://aheblog.com/

"The Academic Health Economists’ Blog exists to provide an online presence for the discussion of issues and developments in health economics. We provide a place where people can present their views, opinions, ideas, and takes on current affairs from the perspective of health economics. The site has a simple aim; to promote healthy debate in the field, with a sharing of ideas."

Contributions

Get involved! Comment on articles posted on this blog and become a contributor to submit your own posts where appropriate. 

https://aheblog.com/