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” explains Dr. Mekitie Wondafrash, a researcher with 15+ years of experience and research advisor at SPIRHR. As they collaborate to develop the repositories, he further noted that such databases enhance the institution’s transparency and accountability specially for research projects which 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 theses are archived in an organized way and increase their visibility. The data repository make theses results accessible to subsequent year residents so that they know what was done in the previous year. It also enhances 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.
