Library support for new research students

If you have recently joined Cranfield to work towards your PhD, you will be in the early stages of exploring your research topic and understanding the academic skills and rigour you will need to develop.

Hopefully you will already have found the Research Student Hub on the University intranet which is your starting point for all the support available to you.

In this post, we want to highlight how the Library can help you in your first few months.

Talk to your Information Specialist

Hopefully you have already attended your Discovering Quality Information training session and met your Information Specialist. Now you know how to find the information you need for your research, you can request a personalised induction session. At this session, we can find out more about your specific research needs, show you the most appropriate resources to use and explain more about how we can help you with publishing your research, research data management and skills training.

Learn how to manage your research data

It is important for the integrity of your research that you follow best practice in storing and sharing your data, and meet your funder requirements.

We have produced a research data management module online. It provides everything you need to know to get started with managing your research data – from a general introduction (RDM 1), to explaining how to write a data management plan (RDM 2) and using our data repository, CORD (RDM 3). We recommend that as a doctoral researcher you should work through the RDM 1 training within your first few months. You must write a DMP (data management plan) for your project before starting data collection, and may well use CORD towards the end of your research.

If you prefer, we also offer a full suite of RDM training (1, 2, and 3) face-to-face via workshops and webinars that you can sign up to via DATES.

And if you have any questions, just get in touch: researchdata@cranfield.ac.uk.

Next steps

When you are ready we can provide you with advice and support to help you:

• manage your references
• undertake and write your literature review
• understand the legal aspects of undertaking research (including data protection and copyright)

And later on, when your research progresses, don’t forget that we can provide extensive advice on how to make your research Open Access , as well as how to publicise it and measure its impact.

Go to the Library research support page on our library website. Choose your library, then Help and support > Research support.

Image by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash