Summer Student Robyn Berardi on McMaster’s Open Access Publications

This summer, the Sherman Centre welcomed six student assistants to work on a variety of projects. Today on the blog, McMaster Experts Student Assistant Robyn Berardi shares her experiences working with Jay Brodeur (Administrative Director of the Sherman Centre) and Jeffrey Demaine (Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian) on McMaster’s ambitious research database:

“My name is Robyn, and this fall I am entering my fifth and final year of Anthropology. This summer I have worked on curating McMaster Experts profiles and ensuring that all information is accurate and up to date.

Outside of working on Experts profiles, my main project has been collecting and analyzing data on McMaster’s open access publications from the past decade. Through this project, we’ve been able to learn how the various faculties and departments tend to publish, as well as their developments in publishing over time.

Most intriguing has been observing the trends of the different types of open access and trying to understand why these trends occur. This project and my overall experience this summer has taught me a lot about the importance of citations and data collection, as well as how complicated information can get!

I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with different styles of graphs and the complexity of displaying information in an effective way.”

Thanks for sharing your work with us, Robyn! Learn more about McMaster Experts and feel free to reach out to Robyn’s supervisor Jeffrey Demaine (Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian) to learn more about the field of bibliometric analysis.