Library guides: Managing research: Managing Research

Managing research

It is important to be methodical and find a systematic way of working and select appropriate tools and technologies to support your research process and to store your work as this will enable you to work more efficiently. See our Digital and social media tools guide for further information.
See how to download data analysis software such as SPSS, NVivo from IT Services.
You may wish to consider using reference management software such as RefWorks to manage your references.

Managing CityLibrary search results

CityLibrary Search is a library search engine that you can use to find books, e-books, journal articles, conference proceedings, theses, videos, and much more.

Saving searches

In order to save searches on CityLibrary Search, you would need to sign in to either a Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive account to save your searches to the cloud. More information can be found on the Ex Libris Knowledge Center.

Research ethics

Why are research ethics important?

Any research that involves human participants or identifiable personal data has ethical implications. At City, we affirm that human participants, animals and the environment must be protected from harm. All research must follow that principle, regardless of the discipline or subject matter of the research.

Research ethics at City

City is committed to ensuring that all research is conducted so that it:

protects the rights, privacy and welfare of participants and their personal data, and
minimises risk to participants, researchers, and the institution.

City uses a system called Research Ethics Online to manage the ethics procedure.

Research data management

Research data is at the heart of research.

The Research and Enterprise Office at City has produced guidance on research data management, including a definition of research data and information on how to create a data management plan and publish your research data.

Figshare is City's institutional data repository. For more information, please see the Research and Enterprise Office's webpage on Digital research data and Figshare.

Creating personal database accounts

You can create a personal account for databases such as EBSCOhost. With an account you can usually save preferences, organize your research with folders, save and retrieve your search history, create email alerts and/or RSS feeds, and gain access to your saved research remotely. Most accounts are creating by logging into the resource with your City IT username and password and then clicking on Login (usually at the top right of the database screen). Doing this will save you time as you can retrieve your research without having to re-run all of your searches.

Writing dissertations and theses, can be a long process. Finding relevant materias through databases and other resources is not the end of the process as you need to analyse them and collect data from them which can be time consuming. Whilst you are performing these tasks new studies covering your topic may have been published. It is important that you include these in your final draft.

Here are details on how you can ensure your literature search is kept up to date:

Database search alerts

Many databases allow you to set up Search Alerts, which provide you with automatic e-mail notifications whenever new search results become available relating to a previous database search you have performed.

Each database will have its own set of instructions for setting up alerts. If you need advice on creating alerts, please contact one of our Research Librarians.

By way of example, alerts can be created for any database searches you perform within databases such as the EBSCOhost and Ovid Online platforms.

Journal content alerts

Tables of contents alerts can be set up to provide automatic email notification of the contents of the latest issues of selected journals. You can thus check the latest contents to see if there are any articles that cover your search topic.

You can create alerts from our electronic journal reader and a current awareness tool BrowZine.

Journal TOCs is a good resource for setting up alerts. It provides free access to the tables of contents from a choice of thousands of academic journals.

If the journal you are interested in is not available through Journal TOCs you can see if it is available from the EBSCOhost or Ovid Online platforms.

You can sometimes create TOC alerts for individual journals. Simply go to their website and see if they provide an email alert option.

RefWorks

RefWorks is an online reference management, writing and collaboration tool designed to help researchers at all levels gather, organise, store and share all types of references which you gather during your research and to generate citations and bibliographies.

Our Refworks Library guide provides login instructions and offers advice on which version to use.

Use Refworks to:

Manage and store your references from projects and dissertations in folders.
Export references from CityLibrary Search and many databases and Google Scholar etc into RefWorks.
Create and format bibliographies in different styles and generate in text citations.
Save PDFs and documents.
Collaborate and share references with others.