Purpose of the modules
Content of the modules
How to use the modules
Practical suggestions

Purpose of the modules

This Canvas course aims to help you develop or improve your information skills and gain a better understanding for the academic information landscape you need to navigate as a doctoral student or researcher.

Focus here lies on academic publications and information resources, how they can be identified, located, and evaluated. If you have specific questions about this, or about the contents of the course, contact the university library.

Even though much of the course content is fairly generally applicable, it has been designed specifically with doctoral students in the social sciences (broadly understood) in mind. Where applicable, it has a focus on the IT environment and research policies at the University of Gothenburg.

Content of the modules

The modules in this resource primarily cover the information landscape from two perspectives:

Searching, navigating and monitoring academic literature to identify relevant research and to stay up-to-date with what is being published.

Information searching: The search strategy toolbox
This module describes different ways used by researchers to search for and monitor relevant research. A researcher will often use all of these different strategies, for slightly different purposes.
Information resources
This module outlines some databases and search engines that are commonly used for information seeking in the social sciences.
Literature reviews
This module focuses specifically on the more structured search required for writing either the section on previous research in an article or dissertation, or for doing a literature review study. Here, the information search process is viewed as a research method, but some of the tools can be useful in less structured searches as well.
Managing your references
This module introduces two reference management systems, EndNote and Zotero, that can be useful for organizing the resources found in the search process, or even be used for locating research.

Publishing your research and understanding how the publication becomes part of the research evaluation landscape and publishing market.

Researcher publishing strategies
This module covers some of the issues to consider when deciding where to submit one’s work for publication.
Research evaluation and bibliometrics
This module explains how publications become part of the evaluation of research and some of the tools that are used, both to evaluate research at a macro level and to assess the individual researcher’s visibility and impact.
Conditions for scholarly publication
This module briefly presents some of the actors involved in publishing research, with a focus on international publishing of journals and books. It goes on to describe why and how to publish research with open access and what to consider when signing copyright agreements.

How to use the modules

The modules provide a general understanding of information sources, strategies, and evaluation practices in the social sciences in Sweden. Much of this is also relevant in specific fields and in other countries, but there are disciplinary and cultural differences. If you use one or more of the modules for self-study, it can be good to take the opportunity to discuss with your supervisor or other experienced researchers, or with fellow doctoral students, about the various themes. Try to understand what is characteristic of information seeking and publishing in your own field. What databases, journals, publishers, social media etc. are commonly used in your field, how are they valued, and what are you expected to know to be considered knowledgeable in your field?

You can, of course, choose to focus on a particular module/modules that are of relevance for you right now, such as Literature reviews. But the modules have been designed to provide a broad understanding of the organization and policies around academic literature in general, so you can benefit from going through them all at some point during your doctoral studies. There are also some suggestions for further reading if you want to delve deeper into a particular topic. Or contact your library to ask for more suggestions.

Contact the university library
Here, you can find information about how to contact the library and more about what services we offer.

Practical suggestions

Navigation
- The resource consists of several modules (see Content of modules). Each module contains several pages.
- You can move to a module by clicking the module link on this page. You can return to this page from each module main page.
- You can move from one page to the next by clicking the button Next at the bottom of the page.
- You can move to the pages in a module from the module main page and return to the main page from the bottom of each page.
- You can also navigate to all pages by using the link Modules/Moduler on the left-hand side.
Page layout
- If you are viewing Canvas on a large screen, the lines of text can become very long. A suggestion for improving your reading experience is to make the browser window narrower. You can accomplish this by clicking the icon in the top right corner of the browser and then adjust the height and width of the browser window to make it a suitable width for reading.
- An alternative could be to ‘print’ the page to a PDF and read it in a PDF reader.

We would like your feedback!

At the moment, this course is still being developed. This means that if you have any suggestions on what could work better, content you would like to see, something that is not working on the site or in the instructions etc., we would appreciate your feedback. Please send us comments on what works well or what could be improved to: helena.francke@ub.gu.se and/or amanda.glimstedt@ub.gu.se.

Original content in this work produced by the Gothenburg University Library is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
For more information see About this resource.