Winners of the SAGE Higher Degree Research Student Publication Prize Announced

Posted by Sandra on 13 September, 2019

A paper on the challenges of visual place recognition for autonomous vehicles has taken out first place in the SAGE Higher Degree Research Student Publication Prize. Sourav Garg was awarded first prize and $1500 for his article, Semantic-geometric visual place recognition: a new perspective for reconciling opposing views, published in The International Journal of Robotics Research.

QUT Library has partnered with SAGE Publishing since 2014 to offer the SAGE Higher Degree Research Student Publication Prize. The prize is awarded to a Higher Degree Research (HDR) student, who is the lead author on a paper published in a peer reviewed journal with a Q1 or Q2 ranking. Aik Kai Tok, Library Sales Marketing Executive at SAGE Publishing said of their support for the award, “SAGE is globally committed to fostering healthy minds and cultures and to supporting both access to and output of the research community. In addition, SAGE invests time and funds in supporting the research community through sponsored awards and research outputs.”

QUT Library received a record number of entries to the prize this year. A panel of five judges, two academics and three librarians, evaluated the submissions on originality of the research, readability, and contribution of the applicant to the publication. Research Support Manager (Acting), Jennifer Hall, said that the calibre of entrants to the competition was extremely impressive, and that selecting the top three papers was no easy task for the judging panel.

Second place and $900 was awarded to Zhongtian Li for his paper, Corporate social responsibility employment narratives: a linguistic analysis, published in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. B.M.C. Randika Wimalasiri-Yapa was awarded third place and received $500 for her paper, Chikungunya virus in Asia-Pacific: a systematic review, published in the Open Access journal Emerging Microbes & Infections.

The awards were presented to the winners on 10 September. Sourav Garg, stuck at the airport in Tokyo due to monsoonal weather, attended via Skype. Sourav’s supervisor, Professor Michael Milford, accepted the award on his behalf.

QUT Library would like to thank SAGE for its ongoing sponsorship of the Higher Degree Research Student Publication Prize.

Get back into study…. again!

Posted on 18 July, 2019

Need to brush up on referencing? Received feedback that you need to find more academic or scholarly articles for your assignments?

The Library is gearing up for our next round of workshops and we are here to help!

Library workshops include:

Researching made easy – After this session, you will use databases more efficiently to find relevant information and current journal articles for your assignments.
Referencing made simple – This session introduces you to the principles and styles of referencing and citing using QUT cite|write. It also explains how you can paraphrase the work of others, avoid plagiarism, and make sure that your work has academic integrity.

Hands-on APA referencing – Ever had trouble working out exactly what it is that you’re trying to reference? Still not sure where to find all the bits and pieces you need to create a reference? This workshop will help you get more familiar with different types of resources and how to reference them in APA style, including articles, websites, reports, ebooks and more.

QUT students can register here for both face to face (on-campus) workshops and also online workshops!

If you can’t make it to a scheduled workshop you can access the online resources here by clicking on the name of the workshop or feel free to contact us here anytime.

We look forward to seeing you!

Get back into study

Posted by Catherine on 22 February, 2019

You’ve just been through O-Week and you’re getting ready to start a new year of lectures, tutorials and research and it all feels a little bit exciting and overwhelming all at the same time. Don’t stress about it though. Get prepared by using some of QUT Library’s resources on academic listening and note-taking; check out the information on the Study page of your Digital Workplace; and use Study Smart, a self-paced research and study skills tutorial, all to help you get the academic year started right.

Study Smart. Research and study skills tutorial

Once you’ve checked your unit outlines, use the Assignment Calculator to work out when you need to start those assignments to keep those stress levels to a minimum. And don’t forget that we’re here to help you in the Library with all of your researching and referencing needs. See (or contact) the staff in HiQ at Gardens Point or Kelvin Grove to make an appointment with a library specialist (face-to-face, telephone, video chat), or use our online chat or email if digital is more your thing. More details can be found on our Need help? page.

International Human Rights Day

Posted by Sandra on 9 December, 2018

On Monday 10 December we celebrate International Human Rights Day. While it will be celebrated in different ways by different people, the message around the world is the same.

This year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70. The document, which proclaimed the inalienable right to which all human beings are entitled — regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, is the most translated in the world.

A really lovely representation of these principals, and a great way to share them with a younger audience is the illustrated edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s published by the United Nations in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

QUT is heavily involved in research into the area of human rights. Here’s some of our most recently published works about the current challenges and issues in the area — available in QUT’s ePrints repository.

O’Brien, Erin (2019) Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative: Victims, Villains, and Heroes.

Kauli, Jackie & Thomas, Verena (2018) Communicating the law: A participatory communication toolkit for human rights defenders in Papua New Guinea.

Huggins, Anna & Lewis, Bridget (2018) The Paris Agreement: Development, the North-South divide and human rights.

Mann, Monique, Warren, Ian, & Kennedy, Sally (2018) The legal geographies of transnational cyber-prosecutions: extradition, human rights and forum shifting.

#StandUp4HumanRights

Wikipedia Editing Workshop

Posted by Catherine on 24 August, 2018

17 years ago, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started Wikipedia and today, it’s one of the most popular websites in the world. It’s visited on average over 41 billion times a month! (Wikimedia Statistics 2018).

Are you one of those 41 billion visitors? Have you read something on Wikipedia and thought, ‘That’s not right! Someone should fix that’. You can be the one to ‘fix that’ and set the world right – learn how by attending a QUT Library Wikipedia Editing Workshop.

It’s a great opportunity for academics, HDR students and Research Support staff to engage with your research area using Wikipedia. In the workshop, you’ll practice writing for a general audience and contribute to Wikipedia by checking, verifying or adding information in your area of research or interest.

Join Wikipedia and make a profile before arriving, then put your editing skills into practice when you get here.

It’ll be held in QUT Library in conjunction with State Library of Queensland’s #QWiki Club.

3 September 12-1.30pm

QUT Kelvin Grove Campus, R306

image of a man and woman looking at an underwater seascape in the background. Overlaid with text about the wikipedia editing workshop

Book in to the Wikipedia Editing Workshop

Explore Nearmap

Posted by Natalie on 8 May, 2018

Do you want to see what your house and suburb looked like 10 years ago?

Would you like to put in solar power but are not sure how much electricity you would generate?

Nearmap is a database of high quality aerial photomaps of Australian cities over time. It is highly relevant for Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Design. It may also be useful where a visual representation of census data over the map is desired.

Things you can do with Nearmap:

Track development of an area over time
Calculate solar energy production
Observe patterns of shade
Measure and mark out boundaries
Estimate the volume of pits, mounds and excavations in truckloads or cubic meters
See the elevation of bare earth and the actual surface, and details of slope between two points
View flood levels

Data layers:

Health including adult distress, childhood development, life expectancy
Law enforcement by types of crime
Property approvals, noise and value
Economics including business size, mortgage, income and rent values, and SEIFA relative social disadvantage
Environmental land use
Nearby schools
Demographics including country of birth, household size, age, age by gender, and population size

An example of Nearmap use…

Police Search and Rescue use Nearmap to find individuals and evidence. Using Nearmap to look at elevation and slope, the search team can calculate how fast people (children vs adults vs the elderly) will move, including factoring in tiredness over time. This allows the search area to be plotted for maximum efficiency.

Access Nearmap via QUT Library’s Databases and specialised search tools. You can then select a relevant study area or view all databases to find the Nearmap link.

Find out more at http://libguides.library.qut.edu.au/databases/nearmap

Love Data Week Guest blogger: Barriers to open data sharing

Posted by Sandra on 14 February, 2018

The 2014 Ebola outbreak mobilized groups of researchers across the world to sequence viral genomes and share data providing information crucial to “designing effective diagnostics, vaccines and antibody-based therapies” [1]. However uncertainties around ownership of data, intellectual property rights, patient consent and poor management of data all make access to the source of truth very difficult and often essential data is not available to research community working on epidemics. QUT PhD candidate Anisa Rowhani-Farid, from the School of Public Health and Social Work, discusses some of these barriers to open data sharing in her guest blog today.

[1] Yozwiak, N. L., Schaffner, S. F., Sabeti, P. C.: Data sharing: Make outbreak research open access. Nature, 2015, 518:477–479, doi:10.1038/518477a

My desire to pursue research in this field began when I was a junior bench scientist some 10 years ago, conducting anti-malarial drug research. I was confronted with the commercial aspect of scientific research. I learned about the institutional arrangements between industry, academia, the community, or “consumers”. I also learned about how intellectual property, patents, and funding arrangements play a critical yet limiting role in contributing to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

PhD Candidate Anisa Rowhani-Farid

It became clear to me that scientific research is driven and, more often than not, pressured by the funding available from government and industry, and that these relationships are primarily based on the conception that scientific knowledge is generated through research that views knowledge as a commodity, distributed at a cost to other researchers and most importantly, populations that might need open access to that knowledge.

As I read more, I wondered what happened to all the public money that was spent on health and medical research. I read Chalmers and Glasziou’s (2009) paper on research waste, as well as the series that was published in the Lancet in 2014 called ‘Research: increasing value, reducing waste’. I learned that around 85% of the world’s spending on health and medical research is wasted per year, and a contributing factor was that the findings of medical studies cannot be reproduced by other researchers and so seemingly successful medical breakthroughs are thus unverifiable [1, 2]. This reproducibility crisis in health and medical research made me think of the way in which scientific knowledge progresses. I was fascinated by the paper written by John Ioannidis in 2005 where he concluded through simulations that most published findings in the scientific discourse are false and misleading [3, 4].

If most of what is claimed in the scientific literature is false, and if scientists are adopting malpractices because of the pressure to commercialise so-called ‘medical breakthroughs’, then how deep will the cultural change have to be for scientists to conduct high-quality research with integrity, and share all their findings, positive or negative? This question has motivated my doctorate of philosophy.

Chalmers I, Glasziou P: Avoidable waste in the production and reporting of research evidence. The Lancet 2009, 374(9683):86-89.
Chalmers I, Bracken M, Djulbegovic B, Garattini S, Grant J, Gülmezoglu M, Howells D, Ioannidis J, Oliver S: How to increase value and reduce waste when research priorities are set. The Lancet 2014, 383(9912):156-165.
Ioannidis J: How to Make More Published Research True. PLoS Med 2014, 11(10):e1001747.
Ioannidis JPA: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLOS Medicine 2005, 2(8):e124.

Watch this video (YouTube 2m8s) from Anisa Rowhani-Farid and follow her @AnisaFarid on Twitter.

If you’re a researcher, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below on your data story.

Visit the Love Data Week blog each day for stories, resources and activities and if you would like to join the conversation via Twitter #lovedata18 #qutlibrary

Love Data Week 2018

Posted by Sandra on 12 February, 2018

It’s Love Data Week!

From the 12^th to the 16^th of February, along with other academic and research libraries, data archives and organisations, QUT Library is celebrating the value and importance of research data, which we believe are the foundation of the scholarly record and crucial for advancing our knowledge of the world around us.

The theme for the 2018 social media event is ‘data stories’ including :

Stories about data
Telling stories with data
Connected conversations
We are data

Anisa Rowhani-Farid, from the School of Public Health and Social Work, Faculty of Health who’s completing a PhD Towards a culture of open science and data sharing in health and medical research at QUT has this to say about data and reproducible science:

“Efforts are underway by the global meta-research community to strengthen the reliability of the scientific method [1]. Data sharing is an indispensable part of the movement towards science that is open; where scientific truth is not a questionable commodity, but is easily accessible, replicable, and verifiable [2]. The cultural shift towards reproducible science is complex and it calls for a twofold change in the attitudes of individual researchers toward reproducibility, and the leadership provided by the systems and services that support scientific research. As such, journals, universities, government bodies, and funders are key players in promoting this culture. Transparency and reproducibility are elements central to strengthening the scientific method, and data provides the key to scientific truth [3].”

Ioannidis JPA, Fanelli D, Dunne DD, Goodman SN: Meta-research: Evaluation and Improvement of Research Methods and Practices. PLoS Biol 2015, 13(10):e1002264.
Reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research: improving research practice. In.: The Academy of Medical Sciences; 2015.
Iqbal SA, Wallach JD, Khoury MJ, Schully SD, Ioannidis JPA: Reproducible Research Practices and Transparency across the Biomedical Literature. PLoS Biol 2016, 14(1):e1002333.

If you’re a researcher, leave a comment below on your data story.

Visit the Love Data Week blog each day for stories, resources and activities and if you would like to join the conversation via Twitter #lovedata18 @qutlibrary

Key technology tools for your IT Business Research

Posted by Maddy on 29 January, 2018

10 years ago when the iPhone was launched, the era of smartphones were just dawning. In 2005 most people received their news via radio, TV or Blackberries. Today most of us look first to our smart phones for information and if our phone is not to hand, we are at a loss and wonder what is going on in the world.

Those who analyse business trends love the Wayne Gretzky (Ice Hockey player) quote and Steve Jobs, at the end of the original iPhone launch couldn’t resist either: “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

Indeed the holy grail of business analysis is predicting the path innovation will take and the speed at which it will move.

Sometimes it is a case of blink and technology overtakes you. (Just ask Nokia 🙂 )

So how to obtain a bleeding edge insight into today’s technology to predict future innovation trends?

Gartner has tools to frame information into visually concise evidence of current market conditions and future directions.

Gartner’s hype cycles graphically display the lifecycle of a technology and provides reference points as to where each company is located within that lifecycle.Use hype cycles to remove the hysteria of a technology’s popular value and instead discover its true commercial potential.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrants are visualization tools based on research, which positions companies within their market place and aligns them with their competitors.

Use Magic Quadrants to get quickly educated about a market’s technology providers, their competitive positioning and the strategies they are using to via for end-user business.

For more help contact HiQ

Christmas Break & the Library

Posted by Maddy on 21 December, 2017

Christmas and New Year are just around the corner. From the 23^rd December until the 1^st of January QUT Library is having a Christmas break and will be closed. But even though our libraries at Caboolture, Kelvin Grove and Gardens Point will be closed during this time you can still access many library resources online.

If you need to do some research, jump on the Library’s Website and search through Quickfind. Or search a database for your subject area by selecting looking under Databases and specialised search tools.

Not sure how to find the information you need? Have a look at our handy how to find guides to find the right database or website for your research. You can also find online videos to watch at home and see what eBooks you can read right from the comfort of your home or at the beach!

And if you need further assistance, HiQ’s Contact Center will be available at the following times –

23 December – 31 December open 10am – 2pm

This excludes 25 & 26 December and the 1st January Public Holidays when HiQ are closed.

HiQ Service Points at Kelvin Grove Library & Gardens Point Library will be back in action on the 2^nd January. Until then, from all of QUT Library, we hope you have a safe and happy holiday!