This guide is collaboration between faculty librarians at the Lied Library and the School of Medicine Library and designed to be used by students in nursing and health sciences programs at UNLV and medical students, residents and fellows at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine who are new to scholarly publishing and research.
The Research Life Cycle describes the entire process from beginning to end when undertaking a research project. Below is a breakdown of the research life cycle with a brief description and recommended resources to explore more. In this guide we highlight the latter half of the research life cycle and focus on presenting, writing, publishing, and understanding how to share your impact.
Think & Plan
The first part of the Research Life Cycle is focused on planning and preparing for your research project. Depending on your research project, you may need to familiarize yourself with the kind of research you will be undertaking for your project.
Questions to consider:
All of these questions should be considered and can be put together using a research plan or protocol.
Meet with a Librarian: At this stage it's also good to meet with a faculty librarian who can provide you with guidance and resources to help you be successful on your research project.
Discover
The second part of the Research Life Cycle is focused on discovery and exploration of your research topic. It's important to know how to select appropriate library resources for your projects wether you are exploring library databases, journals, or books. Part of selecting these resources also requires creating a search strategy. Using your research question you can then build a search strategy to help you locate resources needed for your project. This may include exploring familiar resources such as a library database or looking beyond the library to review specific websites, white papers, reports, data repositories, etc.
Meet with a Librarian: At this stage it's also good to meet with a faculty librarian who can provide you with guidance and resources to help you be successful on your research project.
Gather & Analyze
The third part of the Research Life Cycle is focused on gathering relevant resources and analyzing them. You may want to become familiar with library services that help access important resources such as interlibrary loan, citation management programs, data management, and statistical software packages. See the resources below to learn more.
Write & Publish
This fourth part of the Research Life Cycle is focused on writing and publishing your manuscript.
Visit the Write & Publish page to learn more about this part of the research life cycle.
Share & Impact
This fifth and final part of the Research Life Cycle is focused on knowing how to share your work and understand its impact within the scholarly literature.
Visit the Share & Impact page to learn more about this part of the research life cycle.
Multidisciplinary Collaborations
InCites is a benchmarking and analysis tool developed by Clarivate in connection to Web of Science. This tool can be used to track trends in research and collaboration and identify high-profile researchers at your institution and others. Users can view a variety of visualizations and data and explore researcher and institutional profiles.
UNLV researchers can access InCites by logging into Web of Science through the University Libraries A to Z Database list. ACE login is required.
This guide was informed by others who have created specific guides on related topics. Our appreciation goes out to the following libguides, whose materials we have utilized.
Image Attributions: This guide uses icons from: