All Cambridge University Libraries courses

These twenty-minute sessions are chance to practice searching medical/scientific databases, use referencing software, and have your questions answered about literature searching for your dissertations.

Introduction to Bibliographic Searching in Theology and Religious Studies will give a brief overview of the issues of searching for publications in general, and follow this up with searching the specialist Theology and Religious studies bibliographic database ATLA and Index Theologicus.

Giving a presentation is something everyone has to do whether it is for your course, for an extracurricular activity or society event, or even in the workplace. In this session we'll take you through planning your presentation, how to make everything look good as well as accessible for a diverse range of audiences, as well as introducing you to techniques to present with confidence. And to help finish things off, we'll also give you some tips on how to deal with situations when it all goes a bit wrong.

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 live session is designed to build your skills in reading and assessing research articles for your Part II studies in Biological Sciences. We will cover how to approach reading for different purposes, apply different reading strategies, and critically evaluate articles. We will also spend some time on managing what you’ve read (or not yet read) and writing your literature review, including how to select items to include and reference them properly. There will be activities and discussions throughout the session so you can try your new skills and ask any questions you may have.

This session is for students taking a Biological Sciences route (NST and PBST) for Part II.

Fair attribution for technicians through either co-authorship or direct acknowledgement in research publications is a key component of the ‘visibility’ and ‘recognition’ areas of the Technician Commitment, of which the University of Cambridge was a founding signatory in 2017.

However, there is currently no policy or standard practice for acknowledging the role of technicians, equipment and facilities in the University or the wider sector. Technicians experience a great disparity in their recognition and visibility in scholarly outputs.

This interactive workshop, organised by the Biological Sciences Libraries Team, will introduce you to the scholarly communications process as well as tools such as CRediT and ORCID, and facilitate conversation amongst peers.

Using a reference manager is one of the best ways to look after all of the reading, notes and research that make up undergraduate study in a biological sciences subject. A really good reference manager can even take some of the pain out of referencing in essays and assignments, making sure you don't miss a thing while working to a deadline.

This session will introduce Zotero, an open source reference manager tool. Using live demonstrations, discussions, and troubleshooting common referencing issues, the session will give an in-depth look at how Zotero (and tools like it) can help you manage your work in the first year or two of your degree, ensuring that you don't lose any essential resources and are well equipped with a useful tool for when you start having to do research work for your Part II studies.

In this session we will help you work out why you want to find a particular resource for your work and how having this knowledge will then help you use the best searching approach to finding the thing you need. We will work through looking for things you know exist, things that you haven't found yet, as well as things that just a bit strange.

We will help you translate recommended readings from your lectures as well as showing you all the tips and tricks that librarians use to find things, freeing you up to get on with studying and finishing that piece of work quicker!

This live session is designed to build your skills in reading critically and assessing resources as part of your first year studies. Additional techniques around using effective note-taking, selecting what to read from lectures, as well as building your critical language when writing your first pieces of work will also be covered. There will opportunities for discussion throughout the session so you can ask any questions you may have.

This session is for students taking a Biological Sciences route (Natural Sciences, Psychology & MedVet) at Part IA/IB.