Surfacing the impact of international doctoral research: Working with the EThOS collection

Abstract

• This booklet presents the work of a research team from Durham University who have been working in partnership with the EThOS team at the British Library to build impact from the knowledge and research of UK doctoral theses, making them accessible and actionable for community organisations. Knowledge generated by doctoral theses is rarely surfaced as a coherent body of knowledge from which scientific, social or community organisations can learn. The aim of this project is to work alongside the EThOS team to produce a user-friendly, efficient method for enabling community organisations and businesses to access and use the research within the EThOS collection. The project has been developing an Artificial Intelligence tool for this purpose and the first prototype is now ready for demonstration. The Durham team have been engaging with a selection of research and community organisations to discover what kind of questions and areas of knowledge they might wish to explore and then running searches to surface answers to their questions. So far the team have worked with partners of the British Library including Kew Gardens Science, Museum of Archaeology London (MOLA) and an independent organisation IARS (International Academic Research Services). The team have also explored the previous use-cases of EThOS by the Alzheimer’s Society; the Royal Society of Chemistry; and the FLAX project and written these up as case studies. This booklet presents the outcomes of the pilot searches with research and community organisations. The new tool aims to enable a detailed exploration of the sorts of knowledge that science, health, well-being, educational and social organisations might be able to mine from EThOS, potentially saving them time and money.