Since launching the website in January, we’ve been working
hard to make the site as easily accessible and useful as possible to School
staff and external visitors looking to use our research.
We have worked on making the search function as intuitive as possible and adding help notes where we can. Every effort has been made to mirror what you all will be used to using every day in any other research database. LSHTM ResearchOnline is however a slightly different creature in that it is a permanent record, and full text archive where possible, of only our School’s research output. It therefore attempts to echo School structures and reflect groups and interests within the institution.
One way we are attempting to reflect the nature of the School on the website is to build relationships with our Research Centres. We have worked with the Malaria Centre and Centre for Global Mental Health to tag publications within our database as belonging to the centres. This means their articles can be found by specifically searching for the centre as well as providing them with a personalised page in the website on which people can browse all their publications. This can then be used as a feed of latest research or full historical record to external websites: the advantage being that many of the articles on this feed contain links directly to freely available full text articles.
We can also provide monthly statistics to centres and departments on visitor activity and downloads of their articles. Individuals can see statistics for their own articles by clicking ‘View statistics’ at the bottom of a record.
We have worked on making the search function as intuitive as possible and adding help notes where we can. Every effort has been made to mirror what you all will be used to using every day in any other research database. LSHTM ResearchOnline is however a slightly different creature in that it is a permanent record, and full text archive where possible, of only our School’s research output. It therefore attempts to echo School structures and reflect groups and interests within the institution.
One way we are attempting to reflect the nature of the School on the website is to build relationships with our Research Centres. We have worked with the Malaria Centre and Centre for Global Mental Health to tag publications within our database as belonging to the centres. This means their articles can be found by specifically searching for the centre as well as providing them with a personalised page in the website on which people can browse all their publications. This can then be used as a feed of latest research or full historical record to external websites: the advantage being that many of the articles on this feed contain links directly to freely available full text articles.
We can also provide monthly statistics to centres and departments on visitor activity and downloads of their articles. Individuals can see statistics for their own articles by clicking ‘View statistics’ at the bottom of a record.
The website is also a free to access outward facing resource
through which we want to draw in academics, researchers and health
practitioners from around the globe. Hopefully people will begin to notice that
their papers on the site are indexed by Google and searching references of
staff articles on Google should return links to records and full text articles
on LSHTM Research Online. We recently created a video to guide through
navigation and basic and advanced search functions so everyone can get the best
from the website.
In order to keep developing the website to its full potential we need your feedback; so as you use the site please take the time to email your thoughts or any problems you encounter to researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk
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