Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the scholarly communications video series from the Himmelfarb Library. My name is Anne Linton, and I'm the director of the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library. Today, we will be briefly talking about the basics of collaboration tools in the research process. Our videos are all publicly available and licensed under a CC by NCSA Creative Commons license, although some resources discussed in the series are only available to faculty, staff, and students with access to Himmelfarb Library resources. Let's get started. Today's presentation on tools for research collaboration is just an overview to give you a sense of what tools are available at each stage of the research process. Check the references at the end of this presentation to explore further, or schedule a consultation with our Research Support Librarian, Tom Harrod, or Sarah Hoover, our Scholarly Communications Librarian. Today, we will be talking about tools to find collaborators, tools for conducting team science, and tools for writing collaboratively. Science and the problem it addresses are increasingly complex. Such problems often require diverse teams to conduct successful research. Can you easily find collaborators within your department, within your university, across institutions? Have you thought about creating new partnerships that might bring a fresh perspective to the problem or expand the horizons and impact of your research? There are tools for locating on-campus collaborators. There are a number of steps you can take to identify off-campus collaborators or partners. Begin by asking your closest colleagues about the leaders in your field, by attending national meetings where you will meet colleagues, and by joining social media platforms such as ResearchGate or following known key posters on Twitter and Instagram. But what if you are starting off an adventure into a whole new field of research? Where do you begin? You can do a broad subject search in PubMed and export results with authors and institutions to find the leaders and emerging leaders in a field. You can repeat your search in a database like Scopus, which lets you analyze search results by authors, author affiliations, and topic areas. You can do the same search in a field that is outside of your comfort zone. For instance, if you are exploring obstacles to healthy aging, try an architecture search after reviewing PubMed. You will probably find some interesting insights into fall prevention and identify individuals with perspectives and expertise that can inform your research. Finally, don't forget to comb the webpages of universities with centers of excellence in your chosen field. Once you have identified colleagues with whom to do research, what platforms will allow you to share data, communicate, and manage projects across distances? There are lots of tools to choose from. Some tools, like the Open Science Framework, encompass the entire research lifecycle. Other tools are designed to cover just one aspect of a research project, such as evaluating articles for systematic reviews. An article in Nature last year advocated for broad-based collaboration tools. Popular project management tools for research teams include Trello and Jira, both from the company Atlassian in Sydney, Australia, as well as Asana and GitHub project boards, both in San Francisco, California. These tools are more than simple to-do lists. They help teams to see the broad view of a project, allowing users to create and complete tasks, meet deadlines, capture detail-rich notes, and provide templates for common protocols. The tagging functions of these tools allow managers to assign tasks to team members. If used well, they can make teams more efficient and minimize frustrations, such as forgotten tasks and duplicated work. Your successful research collaboration is complete. Now your team needs to write up your results for publication. There are tools for that, too. Box allows your team to work in a secure environment that provides versioning information. You can invite individuals from outside of GW to collaborate on specific documents. Google Docs are widely available, easily shared, and allow for real-time editing. Note that for regulated data, Google Docs is not considered secure. RefWorks and Note and Zotera are three of many available citation managers that you can use as a team to track citations, create bibliographies, and seamlessly insert footnotes into a paper. New tools for collaborative writing are emerging all the time. Explore the literature to find new tools. Thank you for watching this brief introduction to collaboration tools in research. If you would like to follow up with a consultation on these tools, please contact either Tom Herrod, Research Support Librarian, or Sarah Hoover, Scholarly Communications Librarian, at the emails on the screen. Links to most of the tools mentioned in this video are listed on the following slides.