Develop skills for successful study and research
The resources on this page are designed to support you with your studies and research. You will find guides on how to find resources, identify and evaluate information, reference your sources, avoid plagiarism, and information on software to help you manage your references.
Finding and Evaluating Information
When you are writing your assignments you will need to use a variety of academic quality sources. There are a number of things you can consider to help you find and select information appropriate for your research. The following material will help you to search for, evaluate, manage and keep up to date with information you use in your academic work.
Plagiarism Awareness and Referencing
Referencing is the acknowledgment of the sources you use when producing your piece of work. If you do not do proper referencing, you may be plagiarising and may be asked to attend an academic misconduct awareness course. This section will help you to cite and reference your sources, and avoid plagiarism.
Cite Them Right: Cite Them Right is a referencing guide both in print and online. Print copies are available in the Library under shelfmark 808.027/PEA. The online version works on your tablet or smartphone, so you will always have the guidance you need at hand. You will need to log in using your University username and password.
Reference Managers
A reference manager is a tool that enables you to collect, store, and automatically reference your resources. EndNote is a reference manager that is available on any student computer on Campus. Please contact the Library for more details. There are extensive training material on how to use EndNote on their website at http://endnote.com/training.
There are also freely available reference managers on the internet, which you can use to manage and reference your resources on your own computers. An example is Zotero. Zotero requires you to download its free software on to your computer; it works best with the Firefox browser as it is a Firefox extension. You can create a basic account if you want to access your Zotero library on any computer. There is also a lot of training material at https://www.zotero.org/support/.