2018 Conference for High Impact Research

In this session, books acquisitions editors from two global university presses will demystify all aspects of the publishing process, from finding a publisher to disseminating and promoting your research after publication. The panelists will share insights on a wide array of topics, including how to write an effective book proposal, how to navigate the peer review process, what to expect after signing a contract, and how to avoid common pitfalls. 

This workshop will cover tools and strategies for:
• Managing your scholarly profile – Academia, ResearchGate, Google Scholar Profiles, ORCiD and other researcher IDs
• Avoiding predatory publishers
• Article sharing rights
• Publishing open access – DOAJ, SHERPA/ROMEO, Sparc author addendums, Open Acess Fund
• Understanding metrics and altmetrics

Examining projects undertaken at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, this session will survey digital dimensions that you can add to your research, such as digital collections and exhibits, online teaching resources, and a presence online and on social media, and discuss how the Center approaches and manages collaborations with faculty to produce digital research and scholarship.

Research Leaves/Sabbaticals are precious opportunities to fully focus on your research…and they fly by with alarming speed. This session will explore ways you can prepare and plan, setting yourself up to maximize the effectiveness of your time. We will reflect on how we structured our time during our leaves and the pitfalls that we encountered.  

Citations received is an important measure of impact in academic research. An equally important metric of scholarship is publications in high impact journals where authors must navigate the peer review process. Yet, little is known about how the review process influences an article’s research impact, post-publication. Using a unique dataset of 434 articles published in a high impact journal such as Marketing Science, we develop critical insights for researchers and academic administrators.  

This session will feature two American University faculty members who have been successful in obtaining external funding to support their scholarship. These cases exemplify the high impact research that enhance the national reputation of the University. Jeff Gill, distinguished professor of government, and Mark Laubach, professor of biology, will discuss their work and their paths to achieving productive research outcomes.

Statistical Modeling to Understand Terrorism: An Overview of New Tools
Jeff Gill
Governments around the world spend an enormous about of resources attempting to understand and prevent terrorist attacks. Unfortunately these efforts continue to be only partially successful. Data that describe terrorist events is particularly difficult to analyze, due to the many problems associated with the collection process, unusual clustered variability in the data itself, and the typically poor level of measurement coming from pursuing political actors that seek to deny reliable observations on their activities. In this talk, Jeff Gill will describe some recent statistical innovations that provide revealing and important trends in terrorist activities worldwide. The examples will describe sophisticated statistical procedures in accessible and general language. Many of the conclusions are surprising and show systematic behavior by these violent and dangerous groups.

The OpenBehavior Project
Mark Laubach
An ongoing technological revolution in neuroscience, supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative, has yielded a broad array of new tools to observe and manipulate neural circuits. In parallel, many newly developed technologies to measure and control behavior have been developed but have not been widely shared or disseminated. As such, there remains a gap between the availability of new behavioral tools and their wide deployment by the larger research community. The OpenBehavior Project is addressing this issue by providing an integrated set of activities to facilitate dissemination of resources and training materials for creating and using newly developed technologies for the study of behavior. Our goal is to dramatically lower barriers that researchers face in carrying out sophisticated behavioral neuroscience experiments and raise overall research productivity.

All grant making organizations have their own ways of working, but almost all of them approach the grant making decision process in a relatively similar way. All foundations want to know certain pieces of information such as how does the applicant’s values align with theirs, the applicant’s track record and the impact that the proposed project will make on the community. This session will provide insight from a foundation’s perspective on how grant makers reach decisions and how applicants can position the next proposal for success.

Preserve the Baltimore Uprising is a digital repository that seeks to preserve and make accessible original content that was captured and created by individual community members, grassroots organizations, and witnesses to the protests that followed the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015. This digital archive, built on the Omeka platform, represents a powerful collaboration between university scholars, the Maryland Historical Society, and the public. This session will explore the capabilities of Omeka and the experience of researchers in creating this innovative and consequential project.

In a world where everyone seems to have their own megaphone, it’s important to know how to target the right audience with the right content to create engagement. Attendees will leave this session with actions they can take immediately to help them find and engage their communities of influence on social media. They will also learn which social channels are best for presenting their work, as well as best practices for each.