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Effective note making is an essential bridge between reading and writing. When making notes for a long piece of writing, if you paraphrase and interpret as you go along, you will be able to retrieve what you have learned from reading quickly and efficiently and often produce sections that you can drop straight into your work. This workshop will introduce you to the theory of good note making, discuss different note making techniques and offer advice for deciding which approach best suits your practices.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

The Critical Reading course aims to improve students' ability to read critically and evaluate sources, as well as giving helpful tips about productive reading, note taking and providing a checklist of questions to help them with their reading going forward. It is suitable for all students but aimed mostly at undergraduates.

Most people have online profiles and, as a researchers, your online presence offers many rich opportunities. It is helpful to be aware of tools and tips that can help you boost your visibility online, as well as common mistakes to avoid.

In this course, you will:

• begin to develop your online research profile by making yourself visible to others in a way(s) that suits you.
• learn what an ORCID is and how to obtain one.
• learn what your Symplectic Elements account is for and begin to make it work for you
• review your current visibility and consider the next steps

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

From fair dealing to sharing your research online it seems that nothing with copyright is ever simple. There are few black and white rules about copyright but there can be serious consequences for getting things wrong! This session will cover the basics of UK copyright law and how these impact researchers such as dealing with third party materials, seeking permissions and how to manage risk.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

Copyright law is a complex field with direct relevance for researchers who need to protect their own intellectual work and use work written by others, and most importantly must avoid accidentally infringing copyright. This course provides you with basic knowledge you can apply to your research practice.

The course covers:

• fundamentals of copyright and why it’s important
• what to do if you want to use someone else’s work
• how to protect and share your own work
• how licenses can be used to make it easier to reuse works

You will receive the URL for the course in the confirmation email after booking.

This session will help researchers explore academic literature through discussing key skills such as critical evaluation, structural reading, effective note-taking, and getting started with writing.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

Finished your PhD thesis? It’s time to submit.

Unsure of your access level options? Confused about any third-party copyright in your thesis? Then this session is for you.

The final step after completing your thesis is to deposit an electronic copy into the University’s Repository, Apollo. This training session will cover how to ensure you meet all the requirements for submission, how to decide on the access level for your thesis and finally a demonstration of successfully depositing your work using Symplectic Elements.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

Conference posters are a simple, visual, and effective way of sharing your research. Students will explore key design principles for creating an effective conference poster. You will understand design basics, consider readability and layout, and explore presenting your poster.

Conference posters are a simple, visual, and effective way of sharing your research. They may be presented at academic or professional conferences, Departmental events, or educational events for the general public. A well-designed poster allows you to communicate information about your work in a concise and appealing manner, and engage with colleagues, peers and others in a conversational setting.

Creating a conference poster is a balancing act between including enough detail to effectively describe your work, and keeping it visually attractive and minimal enough that people can understand at least the main points at a glance.

This session will help you create effective conference posters and introduce key design principles.

This session will help researchers go further with their literature review through exploring key skills such as critical evaluation, structural reading, effective note-taking, and getting started with writing your literature review.

This session equips participants with all the fundamental skills that they need to build and execute effective search strategies to locate relevant materials for literature reviews, projects and other related research activities. The session will explore key searching techniques, where to search, how to troubleshoot common searching problems, as well as keeping up to date with the latest research.

This session will include live demonstrations of scientific databases to demonstrate the key principles covered in action.

This session introduces participants to the concept of research data, all the forms that it can take as well as negotiating the management of different data depending on their type.

Topics such as effective storage, handling sensitive data, and developing best practice approaches to avoid data loss during a project will be covered. The session will also explore how to create a data management plan (DMP) and the support available, as well as providing an overview of useful tools and services both within the University of Cambridge and beyond.

This online interactive course will give you advice on how to survive your first year at Cambridge. Topics include introductions to note making, referencing, writing essays, and managing your time.

The course is aimed at Part IA students, with a Science focus. However, the course is open to anyone who wishes to use it, and will be useful for any discipline, or as a refresher for those wishing to learn some new tips and tricks.

This session will introduce participants to different methods of communicating research before moving on to a discussion around best practice and techniques when preparing a presentation. Participants will be introduced to concepts around good design, accessibility, data presentation, and accessing Creative Commons licensed materials for their work.

The session will conclude with an exploration of good delivery techniques with additional advice on what to do if it all goes wrong.

Referencing is a face of academic life. Students and researchers need to explore the work of others in order to build upon it and proper referencing helps to showcase the range and breadth of research undertaken. The ideas of others also need to be credited appropriately in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism. But - it's also a fact of academic life that referencing can be boring and complicated. This session aims to change all that!

In this session we will explore online reference management tools and how they can save you time and effort when compiling your bibliography. Using the tool Zotero as an example we will show you how to import references from a range of sources, create easy in text citations and produce a bibliography at the click of a button.

Need to create a conference poster but are not sure where to start? This session will introduce participants to the fundamentals of designing an effective and engaging poster that is perfect for communicating research ideas. The session will look at good design practice, where to source free high quality graphics, as well as deciding what you should (and maybe shouldn't) include in your final poster.

Do you feel you often experience 'writer's block' where you can't seem to start or make good progress with your writing? In this class, we will discuss ways of mitigating and getting past writer's block, particularly through seeing blocks as opportunities for writing.

Through discussing certain myths about academic writing and healthy ways of conceptualising the writing process, you will become familiar with techniques for freeing up your writing and making steady progress on your dissertation and other writing projects.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

This session will provide an overview of the support and resources available from libraries and other useful departments from across the University of Cambridge for new postgraduates and researchers. It will also provide an introduction to the various training opportunities on offer from library staff on a wide range of useful research themes and skills.

After this session, participants will have a better understanding of what services are out there to help support them in their time at Cambridge and who they can ask for help.

This course is based on a typical literature review lifecycle. You start by planning your search. You then carry out your search. Once you've found some results, you evaluate what you have found to see if it is relevant to your needs. You manage your results by saving them to a suitable place so you can come back to them. If you are interested in tracking changes in your field, you enact approaches to keep up to date with new research. And as your research evolves, you refine your search to reflect new concepts and new terms. And so the cycle continues.

While you may not be as focused on the longer term tracking of new research in your field, being able to plan, search, evaluate and manage effectively are additional skills which we will cover in this course. The course will be structured around the first four stages described above, with optional additional information about the last two stages for those who are interested.

This course is supplemented by live workshop opportunities throughout the academic year.

This course is based on a typical literature review lifecycle. You start by planning your search. You then carrying out your search. Once you've found some results, you evaluate what you have found to see if it is relevant to your needs. You manage your results by saving them to a suitable place so you can come back to them. If you are interested in tracking changes in your field, you enact approaches to keep up to date with new research. And as your research evolves, you refine your search to reflect new concepts and new terms. And so the cycle continues.

While you may not be as focused on the longer term tracking of new research in your field, being able to plan, search, evaluate and manage effectively are key skills which we will cover in this course. The course will be structured around these first four stages, with optional additional information about the last two stages for those who are interested.

This session will help prepare you to begin your literature review. You will learn strategies for searching for relevant material, how to troubleshoot common search problems, and how to stay up to date with new publications in your field.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

This session equips participants with foundational skills that they need to build and execute effective search strategies to locate relevant materials for literature reviews, projects, and other related research activities. The session will explore key searching techniques, where to search, how to troubleshoot common searching problems, as well as keeping up to date with the latest research.

This session equips participants with foundational skills that they need to build and execute effective search strategies to locate relevant materials for literature reviews, projects, and other related research activities. The session will explore key searching techniques, where to search, how to troubleshoot common searching problems, as well as keeping up to date with the latest research.

Please note: This session will be offered, either online or in person, in Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms.

This session discusses the benefits and challenges of maintaining an online presence as a researcher. Part of two sessions on this topic, this second session looks at using social media as a researcher. We will look at the practicalities and pros and cons of online engagement through tools such as Twitter, Mastodon, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Participants should expect to have the opportunity to critically evaluate the various options presented in this session with the overall aim of being better informed when deciding where to invest their time and efforts when building an academic presence online.

Managing your data well is a key responsibility as a researchers and it prevents disasters. You will encounter research data in many forms, ranging from measurements, numbers and images to documents and publications.

Whether you create, receive or collect this information, you will need to look after it properly.

Managing digital information properly is a complex issue. Doing it correctly from the start could save you a lot of time and hassle when preparing a publication or writing up your thesis.