Ways to boost visibility of research explored

MUSCAT: Sultan Qaboos University’s Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Postgraduate Studies and Research (DVCPSR) recently concluded a series of workshops exploring practical steps that staff and faculty can take to increase the institution’s research visibility across a number of domains.

The workshop series, facilitated by Dr Sunayana Nandagopal and Dr Christopher Denman from the DVCPSR office, was attended by faculty, administrators, researchers, and staff from across SQU’s colleges, deanships, and research centres. Although the specific focus of each of the four workshops varied each week, they all shared an overriding concern with the ways in which SQU faculty and staff could work together to increase the visibility of SQU’s research output locally, regionally, and internationally.

The series consisted of a number of hands-on sessions that aimed to be of immediate practical benefit to participants seeking to increase their research profiles in addition to SQU’s profile as a research-intensive institution.

The first workshop in the series examined Scimago institution rankings that are used to evaluate universities and other research-focused institutions around the world.

It offered an overview of the criteria that the Scimago rankings use to assess institutional research performance, including Scopusindexed publications, innovation output, societal impact of research and so on.

This was followed by a workshop that explored some of the benefits of researchers engaging in self-archiving through sites such as Researchgate, Google Scholar, and Academia.edu.

The third workshop in the series was concerned with applying for research funding and writing a research proposal.