Digital tools for the research process

• Skills Training at the LBG Career Center(https://cc.lbg.ac.at/events/skills-training-digital-tools-for-your-research-process/?lang=en)", November 17 2023.

This work is usable under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.

Instructors

Hannah Metzler metzler@csh.ac.at, PostDoc at MedUni Vienna and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Psychology & Computational Social Science.

Jana Lasser jana.lasser@tugraz.at, Professor for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities (W3, interim), Marie Curie Fellow at TU Graz, associate faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Physics & Data Science & Computational Social Science.

Introduction

In this one-day training, we will provide insights and hands-on experience for digital methods that are used for a broad range of activities in daily research practice.

The Skills Training is structured into four major areas of activity that researcher’s engage in in their daily practice:

• Digitally enhanced literature search and management
• Digital collaborations
• Doing (reproducible) research: Documentation & licenses
• New forms of publication

Every topic will feature an introduction into the challenges and possibilities that digitized practices bring in the respective area of research practice. Our experts will show examples of best practices and introduce free and open tools that can be used by researchers to digitally enhance their workflows and make them efficient and transparent. Since learning happens best through doing, this training will be very “hands on” and participants are asked to bring their own research projects to the training and implement workflows that they have learned about right away and in their own research context.

Content Overview

• Introduction and overview [slides]

• Transparency and reproducibility through open research practices

  • Introduction to biases and reproducibility [slides]
  • Research designs and workflows to ensure transparent and reproducible results [slides]

• Digitally enhanced literature search and management [slides]

  • Exercise: Using papers using AI-based search tools [slides]
  • Optional exercises:
    • Zotero: [slides]
    • Literature search workflow with Elicit & Research Rabbit & Zotero [slides]

• Good documentation practices [slides] [exercise: document your repositories]

• Tools and workflows to manage collaborations

  • Living documents [slides] [exercise: using living documents to their full potential]
  • Interactive and enriched research articles [slides]

• Licenses [slides] [exercise: license your research]

• New forms of publication

  • Preprints and overlay journals [slides]
  • Registered reports [slides]
  • Exercises:
    • [Finding out about self-archiving policies]
    • [Finding reproducible journals]

• Final discussion questions [slide]

Tool overview

We will cover the following digital tools in both talks and exercises:

• Repositories: Open Science Framework
• Literature: ResearchRabbit, Elicit, Zotero
• Documentation: Markdown, Open Science Framework
• License Chooser
• Finding open & reproducible journals: Sherpa Romeo, TOP factor ranking

Tools we cover in our talks, but not exercises:

• Hypothes.is
• R markdown, Jupyter notebooks

Tools we mention briefly, but do not cover in detail - you can try them out during the exercises:

• Code or project documentation: Github
• Pads: HackMD, Riseup
• Wikis: Torchpad
• Collaborative Writing: GoogleDocs, Overleaf, Office in OneCloud, Authorea

Preparation for participants

To make full use of the sessions, please join the training from a computer or laptop. We will do a lot of practical exercises, which you can use to work on your own research projects.

• If you want to follow the literature management demonstrations:

  • Make an account at Zotero, install Zotero (Standalone) and the Connector for the browser you usually use.
  • Make an account on ResearchRabbit
  • Make an account on Elicit

• If you want to follow the good documentation practices demonstration:

  • Make an account on OSF (Open Science Framework) OR make an account on GitHub (alternatively: if your institution hosts a GitLab instance, make an account there).
  • If you want to use the exercise for your own research: think about a project (finished or ongoing) you would like to document and bring the relevant files.

Saving slides as PDF

These slides will remain online, but if you want to download them anyways:

Hannah's slides (blue background):

1. open slides in web browser
2. press keys ctrl + p
3. save PDF to your computer

Jana's slides (white background):

1. open slides in web browser, appending the URL with "?print-pdf" (exmaple: https://hannahmetzler.eu/digital_tools_research/05_documentation/slides/index.html?print-pdf)
2. press keys ctrl + p
3. save PDF to your computer

More resources

If you want more content on the topics we cover, checkout the 2-day version of this training here: https://github.com/JanaLasser/digitalisation-in-research-module-2