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Doctoral student – sharpen your research skills with the library
The Social Sciences Libraries offer various types of support for doctoral students at the Faculties of Education, Social Science and the School of Business, Economics and Law.
We are happy to offer a lecture or workshop for groups of doctoral students on any of the topics listed below. This can take place within the framework of a doctoral course, as a separate initiative from the department/doctoral programme, or at the initiative of the doctoral students themselves.
Please contact us using the form below. We tailor the offer in dialogue with you. We request that there be at least three participants.
Getting started with the library’s services
Book an introduction to the various services and collections that the University Library provides for doctoral students. We will take as our starting point a selection of particularly useful services, but we will focus on addressing the needs and interests of the group. The session can take place at the library and include a short tour of the premises, or at your department.
Information search
We focus on how to find literature relevant to your research topic, how to verify what others have published on your topic previously, and how to keep track of what is being published.
We will address some of the themes below and focus on techniques you can apply in your own work.
- how a topic can be turned into an effective search in subject databases
- which databases may be useful for subject-specific searches, interdisciplinary searches, searches in Swedish and/or chain/citation searches
- how to identify and follow key authors and publications
- how to map the literature for a literature review
- how AI-assisted search tools may potentially be used in your work
Publishing with visibility and impact
We will go through some things to consider when choosing where to publish your research, especially for journal publishing. We will address some of the themes below.
- how to navigate among different publishing options, including open access publishing
- how the publishing market operates
- how you can improve the future accessibility, visibility, and impact of your publication
- what indicators such as the h-index and impact factor mean, and how they can (or should not) be used
Manage and organise your references
We will go through how you can use a reference management system (Zotero or EndNote) for more efficient personal information management for your research tasks.
- to save and organise your references
- to manage them when writing texts
- to create new references or import them from databases and webpages
Get started with Nvivo
We offer an introduction to getting started with Nvivo, a software for qualitative text analysis.
- how to code textual material qualitatively
- how to import files into the software
- how to document your choices
- how to use the system for basic visualisations and queries
- how NVivo can be used in literature reviews
Open demonstrations of Nvivo are offered each month.
We also offer other types of support
In addition to the support described above, there are a number of services available to you:
- We offer a Canvas module which cover several of the themes listed above.
- You can book individual search support.
- Join demos of the reference management systems EndNote and Zotero
- Learn about useful tools, techniques, and services available to you in your everyday research activities through 20 minutes for researchers every week in Zoom.
- The Staff portal contains information about research data management.
Contact us
Get in touch with us if you have questions or want to book a lecture, workshop or individual search support on information retrieval or publishing issues.