All Cambridge University Libraries courses

Publishing journal articles is a key element of a successful research career.

Those starting on this journey may have a lot of questions, such as:

• Where and how should I publish my research?
• How do I maximise the number of readers and citations?
• How should I respond to reviewers?

This online module covers the basic skills you need if you are preparing to publish in academic journals.

It will help you to:

• plan a publication strategy and choose the right journals for you
• avoid the snares of predatory publishers
• navigate the peer review process
• understand Open Access publishing and what it means for your publications

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

An introduction to the UL's Rare Books Reading Room and its collections, which include material from the first European printing presses and from the wider world up to the present day.

As a researcher, you will collect a lot of data. Whether that data takes the form of spreadsheets, recordings, images, bibliographies, or something entirely different, it's crucial that you manage it well throughout your projects. Doing so will help you to work more efficiently, avoid data disasters, and build your professional reputation.

In this course, you'll learn:

• how to store and backup up data
• how to organise data
• what to do with protected data (personal or commercially sensitive)
• why sharing data is important and how to do it
• how to write Data Management Plans

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

Data, Metrics, Key Performance Indicators... these terms are everywhere these days, as we increasingly seek hard data to monitor and improve the quality of many of the things we do. Research metrics can be very useful, but they also come with important caveats, so we need to be responsible in how we use these tools.

In this module, you will learn:

• the meaning of common metrics such as Journal Impact Factor and H-index
• what are the main limitations of metrics
• a better, responsible approach to using metrics

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

Being a researcher can mean juggling lots of different things. You might be wrestling with funding, or promoting your work, or finding the most up-to-date research, or even where to begin with writing up that data management plan you probably should have done a few weeks ago!

This course will introduce you to each of these concepts through a short video, a bit of reading, and a quick exercise to give you some time to explore and reflect on your own research needs. By the end of the course you will hopefully have a better idea of what your funder wants from you, how you can begin promoting your work, what techniques you can use to get that really useful research, as well as having already started writing up your data management plan.

All of our content will be self-guided but the Biological Sciences Libraries Team (email: sbslibraries@lib.cam.ac.uk) will be on hand throughout to have an online chat with you if you have any further questions or want to explore something further. If you have any technical issues or need any course content in a different format, you can contact George Cronin (Library Manager for Biological Sciences) at gmp36@cam.ac.uk who will be able to help.

Focuses on core study skills to help students plan their learning and revision

Have you ever searched for articles on a topic and returned thousands of results... or none? Are you always defaulting to Google Scholar and wondering if there’s a better way of doing things? Are you starting to look into a new topic and feel overwhelmed and unsure where to start? Then this online course is for you.

We will look at the three stages of a successful literature search:

• planning a strategy and identifying the right key words
• searching using the right tools and maintaining accurate records
• evaluating results and refining search parameters

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

In this informal session you will be able to learn more about various topics and resources, including

• reference management
• text mining
• data visualisation
• tools for structuring long-term writing projects
• resources for legal research
• copyright and Creative Commons

You will be able to rotate between these different areas, exploring tools on the areas that interest you most and how they can help your research, or what you feel you need to learn more about. The session will be led by librarians from across the different Schools in the university, and from the University Library.

Please only sign up for one of the sessions. There are no fixed time slots so feel free to drop in and out as you wish within your allocated hour.

This short interactive module introduces you to Cambridge University Libraries and explains how to find resources for your subject. This module has a focus on the Biological Sciences strand of the Natural Sciences Tripos, and is suitable for anyone who is new to Cambridge.

Come to the Library’s Historical Printing Room. Set your name in type and hand-print an illustrated keepsake as a memento of your visit.

On top of the millions of books held at the University Library, we also have a considerable collection of printing artefacts. This began with a decision in the early 1970s to set up a bibliographical teaching press on the lines of those already existing at the Bodleian, University College London and elsewhere. The impetus for this plan came from the late Philip Gaskell, then Librarian of Trinity College. The main aim was to enable students of literature to understand the practical details of hand composition of type and of printing on a hand-press, and thus to appreciate the ways in which both conscious decisions and accidents in the printing house could affect the accuracy of a text.

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/rare-books/collections/historical-printing-room

Take a break from revision stress with a twenty minute guided tour of the famous UL Tower. An experienced member of staff will take you up one of Cambridge's tallest structures where you can experience dazzling views of Cambridge as well as seeing some of the unique material that the tower holds.

Please be aware that access to the Tower is by lift/elevator only.

Bringing collaboration in early research and research communications squarely into the open research movement has the potential to bring real benefits; from speeding up discovery in research by making more aspects of the production of research available to other researchers; to providing recognition to more component parts of the research process; to helping to disrupt and improve the article publishing model to making interdisciplinary work less challenging and more impactful. But what are the barriers and how can the research community overcome them in partnership with publishers and other stakeholders?

This workshop will have 3 parts:

• An update on how the Press is working to encourage collaboration around big research questions at the intersections of research fields in order to open up a conversation with the University research community. A brief introduction will share examples where the Press is challenging the traditional reward structures around article publishing, facilitating bottom-up interactions in the production of research on their new open research platform Cambridge Open Engage and highlights from recent market research they’ve conducted.

• Generate a list of shared barriers to collaboration across participants

• Discuss how making collaboration more open could tackle some of those barriers, the benefits of making collaboration more open, and specific ways that the stakeholders in the conference (researcher, publisher, library, etc.) could support a move towards openness like this.

Collecting impact evidence from social media of publications, conference papers or any other scholarly output can be complicated and time-consuming. In this session, we'll introduce you to a number of tools that can help to streamline and simplify these processes: IFTTT, Twitter analytics, Altmetric and ImpactStory.

Read and research in an East Asian language? Visit the UL’s Aoi Pavilion with over 300,000 volumes written in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. You will see the East Asian Reading Room and Aoi bookstacks. You will learn how to find books in the open stacks and how to request them from closed stacks.

This tour will include some main areas of the UL, but readers primarily interested in English or European collections should join an ‘Orientation Tour’ instead.

Cambridge University Library is one of the top research libraries in the world and holds over 8 million items. If you are a member of Library staff at a college, department or faculty library and would like to give your students introductory tours of the UL, then we would love to help you gain the knowledge and confidence to do that.

Email us today (research-skills@lib.cam.ac.uk) to organise a one-to-one tour with an experienced member of UL staff. We will guide you through the orientation tour route that we use for our own tours and can answer any questions that you may have.

Cambridge University Library is one of the top research libraries in the world and holds over 8 million items. If you are a member of Library staff at a college, department or faculty library and would like to give your students introductory tours of the UL, then we would love to help you gain the knowledge and confidence to do that.

Email us today (research-skills@lib.cam.ac.uk) to get started. We can give advice via email or by telephone (including sharing our tour notes and guidance) or we can organise a one-to-one tour for you with an experienced member of UL staff. We will guide you through the orientation tour route that we use for our own tours and can answer any questions that you may have.

Drop in for a chat with a member of the Biological Sciences Libraries Team:

We can help you with lots of things including:

• referencing
• getting to grips with critical reading
• understanding your recommended reading
• finding books and digital content
• successfully executing a literature search
• and much more!

If we can't answer your question in the session, we'll take your details and investigate it further for you!

• Nervous or intimidated about visiting the UL for the first time?
• Don’t know where to begin with a Literature search?
• Can never find the books you need on the open shelves?

Ask a librarian!

Individual or small group supervision style sessions tailored to your needs. Available online or face-to-face.

If you would prefer a different day or time, email readerservices@cam.ac.uk to arrange a session. Tell us what you need help with and we’ll match you with a member of library staff who can show you what you need to know, whether it’s searching the catalogue, using Electronic Legal Deposit, finding open shelf books or something else entirely.

Don't suffer in silence - Ask a Librarian!

This session will give a brief overview of several tools that can be used for collaborative research. Participants will be introduced to Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), collaborative online writing tools such as Overleaf, OneNote and Evernote, before finishing with a look at GitHub.

Description - This session is designed for PhD students in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The session will include a brief introduction to copyright and how this relates to re-use of images. The advantages of creative commons licences will be described with demonstrations of websites that specialise in CC0 images. The benefits of ARTSTOR as a specialist image database will be explained. Dr Lorraine de la Verpilliere will explain using case studies how to copyright-clear images for publication and give tips on the best ways to achieve this. There will be time for questions.

The benefits for your work, your field, and your institution that come from publishing research Open Access (OA), whilst numerous and proven, are often unknown or misunderstood.

In this session we will look at:

• our article and ebook usage data to show why publishing OA results in more citations, more downloads, and broader reach for your research vs non-OA regardless of its field
• popular myths about OA, and then debunk them
• a case study featuring Cambridge OA authors and the effect on their research
• the different routes to publish OA you have as Cambridge University researchers.

Session 1: Introduction to working with digital manuscripts This workshop will introduce you to digital manuscripts by exploring how and where to find them, what to expect when you do, understanding digital manuscript resources and what you can do with them.

Session 2: Tools for working with digitised manuscripts This workshop will introduce you to some of the tools that can be used when working with digital manuscripts. We will also explore further ideas and tools in addition to some other sources for assistance and further learning opportunities.

A session designed to take you step-by-step through academic writing and publication, with tips and resources to make writing up as simple as possible. The session will demystify the peer-review process, and help you to improve the precision and clarity of your academic writing.

The aim of the workshop is to give an overview of how graduate students can make effective use of Zotero software for referencing and managing information.

You may have already thought about using Zotero, in which case you will find this workshop especially helpful if you have already downloaded Zotero to your laptop and bring it with you.

This workshop will especially suit graduate students from the School of Arts and Humanities, or Humanities and Social Sciences.