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Overview

Through a mix of face-to-face activities and webinars, our workshops aim to help you to develop the skills you need throughout the research process, from literature searching, referencing, managing research data, to identifying places to publish your work.

Visit the student researcher webpages to explore the Library's support for research or contact your librarian for more information.

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Workshops

Building your research profile

Do you want to improve your visibility and showcase your work effectively online?

This in-person workshop aimed at PGR students and early career researchers will introduce you to a range of tools to help you to:

• Share, promote and discuss your research within and beyond an academic environment.
• Understand more about personal identifiers and how to distinguish yourself from others.
• Automatically keep your record of research outputs up-to-date.

This session will introduce you to readily-available online tools, such as ORCID, enabling you to maximise your visibility in the research community, and begin to create an online personal profile. You won't build your profile in a day but the aim of this webinar is to get you started.

Tuesday 11 March 2025 14:00-15:30

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Beyond the Impact Factor: Using metrics to identify influential research

With an ever-increasing amount of published research, it can be difficult to identify key publications and authors in your field.

This session will give an overview of citation metrics and altmetrics and introduce a range of tools that can be used to find highly-cited and highly-discussed journals, authors and papers. You can use them to help discover topics, researchers, papers and journals which generate interest and attention within academia and beyond.

Whilst metrics should always be used alongside qualitative judgements and are not an indication of quality, they can provide a useful insight into how research is shared, cited and discussed. We’ll discuss the strengths and limitations of metrics such as the impact factor and provide guidance on how to use metrics responsibly.

Wednesday 19 February 2025, 14:00-15:30 (in person)

• More information on metrics is available about tracking citations and online mentions.

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Copyright and open access: Your thesis and beyond

What is copyright and how does it affect you as a researcher? Sign up to this session to find out how you can reuse material fairly and legally in your writing - and how copyright protects works that you produce. Discover the possibilities of open access publishing and what your responsibilities are as a doctoral researcher to make your research available to the widest possible audience.

Session dates and times:

• Tuesday 25 February 2025, 10:00 - 11:00 (online)
• Thursday 8 May 2025, 14:00 - 15:00 (online)

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Introduction to reference management  

This one-hour workshop will introduce you to the purposes and principles of using reference management software. You will learn how to import references, edit references, and how to insert citations into your written work.

We will demonstrate the fundamentals of reference management software using Endnote 21, which is our recommended program. 
 

Session dates and times (all in the Information Commons):  

• Tuesday 21st January 10:00-11:00
• Tuesday 18th February 14:00-15:00
• Tuesday 18th March 14:00-15:00
• Tuesday 22nd April 11:00-12:00
• Tuesday 20th May 15:00-16:00
• Tuesday 17th June 11:00-12:00

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Introduction to open research

Open Research is a set of practices aimed at making the processes and outputs of research more transparent and freely accessible whenever possible. These practices increase the impact of research, enable broader access to knowledge, and address concerns about the reproducibility of academic studies. This session will provide an overview of some of the concepts and practices that support open research, and explore ways these might be relevant to your own research.

We’ll talk about: The background and purpose of the open scholarship movement;  Open research and the research lifecycle,  Pre-registration and registered reports;  The FAIR and CARE principles; Open data and software; Open access publishing; Alternative publishing platforms, preprints, and open peer review;  Showcasing your open research activities using ORCiD.

We’ll provide a broad overview of these practices and ideas and encourage consideration of ways your own research project could be made more ‘open’ - including quick wins such as registering and using an ORCiD ID. We’ll also highlight sources of additional information and training for those interested in finding out more about specific aspects of open research.

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Research data management and writing a DMP

This interactive workshop will help you to get the most out of your research data. You will learn how to organise, store and share your data while keeping them safe and secure, and look at using existing data in your research. You will also find out how to create a data management plan (DMP), which is a submission requirement of the confirmation review.

Recommended for all research students, ideally when you are starting to plan your research.

You can find details of other research data management training here.

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Making research data FAIR

FAIR is a set of principles created with the intention of making data and other outputs more available to, and reusable by, others. The FAIR principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - often seek to enhance data's ability to be discoverable and usable.

This seminar will introduce these principles and give guidance on how you can implement them in your research, as well as showcasing the FAIR guidance resource from the Research Data Management team in the Library.

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Pre-registration - the basics

“You must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool”.  So said Richard Feynman about the process of doing research and acquiring knowledge. Pre-registering is a way to avoid fooling yourself and others, and to increase the transparency of your research.

A pre-registration is a clear statement of your intended research plans - what your research question is and how you plan to collect and analyse data to address that question. This statement is time-stamped and can be openly published before any data is collected and analysed. This helps you keep on track and avoid the temptation to distort your methodology in pursuit of positive results. It also highlights your research’s integrity, giving others greater confidence in your work.

In this one-hour session, researchers and library staff will outline why pre-registration is important and how to pre-register your planned research.

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Tools for literature searching

This workshop introduces the literature searching tools provided by the University Library and provides opportunities to use and evaluate them with support from Library staff. Search tools included are StarPlus (the Library catalogue), multidisciplinary citation databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus) and subject-specific databases.

Session dates and times:

• Tuesday 4th February 2025 11.00-12.30
• Wednesday 26th March 2025 11.00-12.30pm

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'Sensitive’ Data Management

Managing sensitive data throughout your research is an important and involved process. In this session we will cover exactly what counts as 'sensitive' data, and how this can be different to personal data, why it's important to look after sensitive data, the extra procedures and documents that you might need to do follow and write around sensitive data, including the legal basis, and what to do with your data at the end of your research project.

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Qualitative Data Management

Fully managing qualitative data can often seem simple at the start of a project but unwieldy by the end. In this session we will cover some best practice for keeping your qualitative data manageable and in good shape, the overlap between qualitative data and sensitive data, and what you can do throughout your project to ensure that at the end of your study your data sharable and reusable by other researchers, maximising the value and usefulness of your data.