Researcher News & Insights

If you’re a scientist, researcher, doctor, engineer, economist, journalist working on responses to COVID-19 - or perhaps you’re just interested - we want to make sure that staying up to the minute with the latest research and papers about COVID-19 is as easy as possible.
We want to make sure you never miss important papers that could change the course of your work and accelerate a breakthrough that could change lives - so we’re creating a series of resources to help you:

• We created The COVID-19 International Research Collaboration (CIRC). CIRC aggregates the papers that have the most engagement from the highest quality users on Researcher. The papers are split into the following themes: Vaccine, Drugs, Treatment, Drug Pathways, Sequencing, Economic Impact, Social Impact and Epidemiology.

As part of our Global Researchers series we’ve been in contact with Researcher users to learn more about their research, the challenges they face, and what benefits they’ve derived from Researcher. 

Speaking with researchers to understand the reasoning behind their research is instrumental for publishers. These small insights aid the publishers of the paper in understanding how they affect the day to day lives of researchers, their colleagues and their research.

Researcher, a discovery platform for academics and scientists, has announced a new project, ‘ReviewHub: reinventing peer review in the digital age’. It will be jointly funded by Researcher and a grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. 

COVID-19 cases currently stand at over 445,000 worldwide. Now more than ever, scientists, researchers and publishers are working together to accelerate and distribute research that can contribute to the cessation of this pandemic. 

Since mid-January 2020, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of papers relating to coronaviruses as a collective, and COVID-19. As of 17/03/2020 there have been a total of 1,882 COVID-19 related paper abstracts published across 530 different journals on Researcher. 

Why do researchers do their research and how did they arrive at their academic niche? As part of our ‘Featured Authors’ series, we previously spoke with Alison Heard from the University of Calgary who discussed her paper as well as the challenges faced throughout the entire research, writing and publishing process. 

As a speaker at the University of Oxford’s Curo-Pi3 conference in 2018, we interviewed Professor Rik Tykwinski. He shared his insights into what young academics and PhDs should do when attending academic conferences, what academics get up to when they attend international conferences, and how simple curiosity can be the driving force behind academic research. 

As part of our Global Researchers series, we’ve been in contact with Researcher users to learn more about their research, the challenges they face, and what benefits they’ve derived from Researcher. 

Why do researchers undertake research and how does Researcher impact this process? With the sheer volume of papers being published across a whole spectrum of subjects, it can be difficult to understand the motivations and behaviours of individual researchers. Yet learning how academics and researchers ‘do what they do’ and understanding how the embracing of new technologies is driving scientific innovation is important for the entire scientific publishing community. 

Since Researcher launched in 2017, we have displayed millions of paper abstracts across multiple subjects and disciplines to over one million researchers and academics globally. We could analyse streams of data that pinpoint trends in academia and scientific publishing, but this fails, from an individualistic perspective, to uncover one of academia’s most important questions - ‘why?’. Why do researchers do their research and how did they arrive at their academic niche?

Over the last few years, research output in Africa has increased significantly. National and international technologies and strategies, and infrastructure for future research development, have all had positive effects on African research output. Yet the continent of Africa still generates less than 1% of the world’s research. Both a lack of funding and global scientific publishing trends have created tensions for those undertaking research in Africa. 

To recognise the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we are celebrating the most prominent women scientists and their research. There are a significant number of women in science making a major impact in their respective fields, and although this number is increasing, they are still significantly underrepresented in STEM.