Postgraduate Support

As a postgraduate student the Library has a number of services and support available to you.

Dedicated Study Spaces

As well as being able to use the study spaces in Templeman Library and around campus postgraduates have their own study space in the Senate.

Taking your research further

As a postgraduate student you are going to be required to read more widely and in greater depth on your chosen topic. Whilst LibrarySearch is still a good place to do a scoping search to see what literature is out there you will find that subject specific and specialist databases will be really useful at discovering more in depth research.

To identify useful databases see our Digital Directory list. Use the filter down the side to limit your results to certain type of resources e.g. book, journals, newspapers etc. You can also use this to find grey literature sources, thesis and dissertations and conference proceedings.

Key database for academic literature reviews are:

• Scopus
• Web of Science
• EBSCO host – you can choose which databases to include in your search. Fot more detail about any database hover over the little speech bubble to get a full description

These databases will allow you to save your searches, create search alerts and conduct citation searches.

If you are interested in doing a systematic review have a look at Cochrane Interactive Learning modules. Whilst systematic literature reviews are primarily used in medicine the concepts will be of use much broader. Module 3 Searching for studies in particular is useful for all disciplines in helping develop a search strategy.

Keeping track of your sources

As you will be reading wider you will need to have a system of keeping track of your references. Reference tools such as Mendeley or Zotero can help you create an online library and also generate your in text citations and bibliography.

Visit our reference management tools webpage to learn more about these reference management tools and check the referencing style for your discipline.

There is also an interactive section on the Library Research Skills Moodle site that will help you to get to grips with managing your references.

Research Support

As well as your liaison librarian the Library also has a research support team which can help you with various aspect of your research. See their website for further details