Research is the backbone of higher education, and research repositories play a vital role in enhancing the visibility of the research theses and research activities carried out by institutions. Postgraduate students and faculty members face various challenges in accessing research conducted in previous years and are prone to plagiarism and duplication. Cognizant to this, Dr. Delayehu Bekele , Associate Professor at Department of OB/GYN , SPHMMC and team lead of Research brought forward creating research thesis and data repository within the institution.
“Institutional repositories are essential in improving communications of research outputs with a wider audience by capturing and preserving research outputs with the broader” explains Dr. Mekitie Wondafrash, a researcher with 15+ years of experience and research advisor at SPIRHR as he explains the importance of research repositories. As they collaborate to develop the repositories, he further notes that such databases enhance the institution’s transparency and accountability including identifying research projects that are funded by the government or other funding organizations.
Institutional repositories are essential in improving communications of research outputs
Weighing the importance of such databases, OB/GYN research thesis and data repository is created to ensure thesis are archived in an organized way and increase the visibility of the thesis and research activities. The data repository will serve as a good access to subsequent year residents to reference to know what was done while enhancing data sharing, reuse of the data, transparency and reproducibility of the data generated by residents.
Dr. Biruk Abebe, EMR and medical information manager at SPIRHR, notes that in addition to the out of the box features, the system was customized to incorporate additional features requested by the OBGYN department including the ability to add, edit and view a structured abstract when adding a thesis to the repository. Since the research thesis repository was launched on https://repo.spirhr.org, there is encouraging trend of its use evidenced by an increase in the number of request to access copies of the thesis on the repository.