Doctoral seminar: Conducting a literature review

This seminar brings together current doctoral students and experienced researchers to discuss about conducting reviews of the literature for their academic papers and theses. The seminar is jointly organised by a team of EUROSCI Network members and sponsored by selected EUROSCI Network partners. There is an absolute limit of 8 places for doctoral students in this seminar, and the geographical and scientific diversity of students will be actively promoted in order to ensure that all regions, cultures and scientific fields across the Network are fairly represented, and a North-South balance is achieved.

The aims of this seminar are to provide early doctoral students with basic research methods for their own research, disseminate new research methodologies and good practices, and link doctoral students and advanced researchers to facilitate collaboration across the EUROSCI Network.

Methodology:

This seminar consists of five fortnightly two-hour sessions. Each session is led by an experienced doctoral supervisor or a guest expert and contains presentations and discussions by participating doctoral students.

Topics:

1. What is a literature review and why is it important for your research? Managing a literature review. The thesis as a product. An introduction to Agile. 2. Finding relevant literature for your research topic. An introduction to indexing and abstracting services. Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. 3. Reading literature on your research topic. Managing your time. Managing your bibliographies, citations and references. An introduction to bibliographical management software. Endnote, Refworks and Zotero. 4. Writing up your literature review. The literature review in the structure of the thesis. Open-up and focus-down approaches. Publishing your literature review.

Indicative reading:

Dunleavy, P. (2003). Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Teaching modules:

There are no teaching modules to show for this course.

Course gallery:

There are no gallery pictures to show for this content.