Research Support Services

Guided by CSIR-NAL’s pursuit of research excellence and relevance, the ICAST envisages providing services to its scientists & technologists at each stage of the research lifecycle. ICAST has taken initiatives to ensure access to the best possible scholarly resources, novelty search platforms, research tools, IPR sources, etc. Following services are offered to the CSIR-NAL research community:

 Literature Search:

‘Shodpavan,’ a discovery platform enabled using EBSCO discovery service to provide access to a wide band of scholarly content integrated from several sources. The ‘Shodpavan’ empowers NAL researchers with single window access to CSIR-NAL subscribed digital content, physical collection, NAL institutional repository, and scholarly open access content. Click here to access shodpavan

Novelty/Prior art Search:

Prior art / Novelty search service is an important activity for any research library. It helps its researchers generate ideas for R&D, avoid duplication of research, reduce R&D investment significantly, plan for new technology/products, etc. ICAST has subscribed to leading patent databases ‘Patsnap’ and ‘QuestelOrbit’ to enable its researchers to carry out patent analytics, landscaping, and insights report along with aggregated free patent databases. To know more about Novelty / Prior art search, Click here

Plagiarism / Similarity

Plagiarism has become major research misconduct in the present-day digital world, along with data fabrication & falsification, image manipulation. To check plagiarism, CSIR-NAL has mandated all its research publications to undergo a similarity check as per CSIR guidelines. iThenticate plagiarism tool is used to generate similarity reports as per CSIR / UGC guidelines. To know more about Plagiarism /Similarity, Click here

Journal Selecting Tools:

Often, research articles get rejected since they may not fit into the journal scope. There are more than 33K peer-reviewed STM journals, which make researchers, especially young researchers, to select an appropriate journal to publish. Journal selecting tools/platforms will be of great help. To know more on Journal selecting tools, Click here

Reference Management Tools

A reference manager is a software package that allows scientific authors to collect, organize, annotate, research papers and insert citations automatically in their manuscripts. ICAST has subscribed to Endnote web, popular reference management, and helps its authors to use free and open-source tools by imparting necessary training. To know more about reference management tools, Click here