Information for Academic Staff

Library Services support your own research.

In this section we will look at how the Library Services can support your own research. This includes:

• Get in touch with our Research Support Team
• Make your research open
• Manage your research data
• Find a home for your publications
• Use Elements to record and deposit your outputs
• Be a publisher
• Achieve and measure academic impact
• Find and manage information
• Accessing literature and managing information
• Access to other libraries
• Acquire skills
• For new researchers

The Library Research Support team provides high quality information and advisory support services, We support research students, researchers, research active academic staff and other university colleagues and aim to build the University's strengths in research, innovation and knowledge transfer.

We are here to help you throughout your research project. Do you have an enquiry? Please get in touch!

Email: library-research-support@shu.ac.uk

Call: (0114 225 3852)

Open Research is our core value. The principles of open research encourage you to make your research open at all stages of the research process to optimise its impact and integrity.

Library Services help you to make your research open at every stage of the process, from working out the original idea through carrying out the research to sharing the finished work.

We also promote how Open Research is practiced here at Hallam, for example our Open Research Podcast is a platform for our researchers to share their experiences.

Research often consists of collecting or creating research data, and then analysing these data. Research Data Management (RDM) covers the whole lifecycle of your research data. It includes planning your work with data, managing your live data, preserving your archived research data for the long-term, and sharing your archived data with others. It applies to all disciplines and to all forms of data.

Library Services help you with writing your Data Management Plans – an integral part of the ethical scrutiny that is applied to all research conducted at the university. We also help you with the storage and management of your live data, as well as with the long-term preservation and sharing of your archived data.

 Library Services manage the long-term research data archive (SHURDA).

At some point you will make decisions about where to publish, how to make your work openly accessible to others. You might have developed or will want to develop a publication strategy.

Library Services offer support in choosing where to publish, and to find high quality journals for your work. We also help you to make your work Open Access, and on developing a publication strategy.

Library Services manage the University’s repository for research outputs (SHURA), the University’s publications management system (Elements), and the University’s Open Access Fund to pay for Article and Book Processing Charges.

Elements is the University’s publications management system. Elements contains a list of all your research outputs and it will pass them on to other systems, especially to your profile page on the external SHU website. Elements can find your publications automatically for you, when you have logged your unique identifiers with the system (such as ORCID, Web of Science ReseaercherID, Scopus Author ID, SSRN Author ID and your email addresses).

Please use Elements to deposit your research outputs and configure it to claim your papers automatically for you.

Library Services support you in using Elements, and in retrieving research intelligence based on the publications logged in the system.

You can log in with your SHU username and password here: https://elements.shu.ac.uk

If you, your school, centre or institute is interested in publishing your own academic journal, or if you wish to publish your academic monograph, edited collection or educational resource open access, we have just the thing for you:

• We manage a platform for you to publish an open access journal
• We manage Hallam Open Press, which publishes open access books and textbooks – the press will be launched soon
• We can provide you with a DOI and/or an ISBN

Achieve academic impact.

As a researcher, you can increase your influence by ensuring that you present yourself and your research outputs effectively. 

Library Services support you in the various ways you can achieve academic impact, and in identifying and using the tools we have at our disposal to increase our impact.

Measure academic impact

At some point you may wish to measure your academic and wider impact, for example based on citations or mentions in news outlets, social media, or government policy documents.

We provide support for measuring your impact based on citations and other indicators (alternative metrics).  We champion a responsible approach to using quantitative metrics for research assessment. In practice, a responsible metrics approach means that you understand the limitations of any metrics you use and that you use them for

An integral part of conducting research is finding and using the relevant literature. 

Library Services help you with literature searching, how to access resources, reference management and keeping up to date with developments in your subject area.

To support you with the knowledge you need for your teaching and for your own research, you can use Library Search to search our entire SHU collection.

The library offers extensive online and physical resources for staff to borrow.

You will have remote access to eJournals, eBooks, market research, newspapers, and video streaming as well as over 370 subject-related databases.

The option to 'Expand your search beyond SHU collection' allows you to go even further afield.

Our Accessing Full Text guide gives more information on how to access the full text of journal articles, research papers, book chapters and much more.

For any material we do not have readily available in our collection, you can request through our Document Supply Service.

You can use the Library's Document Supply Services to request books, book chapters, journal articles and other resources not available at Sheffield Hallam. The Document Supply Service will then apply to borrow these resources from other libraries, both from within the UK and from around the world.

Requests for journal articles and book chapters are delivered to you by email, usually within a day.

Requests for books can take up to 10 working days, and the books can be collected from either Adsetts or Collegiate Library. If we supply access to a book using this service, this is a loan and needs to be returned to the Library at the end of the loan period so that we can return it to the lending library.

Sconul Access

The SCONUL Access scheme allows staff and students to register for membership of other university libraries and, in some cases, borrow from them.

For more information on the scheme and how to apply, please see the Sconul Access website.

The Archives Hub

The Archives Hub brings together descriptions of thousands of the UK's archive collections. Representing over 350 institutions across the country, the Archives Hub is an effective way to discover unique and often little-known sources to support your research.

Watch this video for a quick introduction to the hub.

The National Archives

The National Archives is home to millions of historical documents, which were created and collected by UK central government departments and major courts of law.

JISC Library Hub Discover

JISC Library Hub Discover exposes rare and unique research material by bringing together the catalogues of major UK and Irish libraries. In a single search you can discover the holdings of the UK's National Libraries (including the British Library), many university libraries, and specialist research libraries.

Watch this video for more information about the service.

Library Services facilitate regular sessions that cover topics related to your research.

Find and book our events

We also hold drop-ins on Mondays from 10am-11am and on Fridays from 2pm-3pm. Just come along to the session Collaborate room.

If you're new to SHU or just starting as a researcher, we can help you get started. Please have a look at our guide or get in touch for a 1-2-1.