Information skills - getting the most from your studies

If you have good information skills you'll be more able to carry out the following activities effectively - all of which can help you with your studies -

• identify the information you need for course work
• locate & access the information efficiently
• evaluate the quality and appropriateness of the information you find e.g. for -
  • relevancy
  • authority
  • credibility
  • accuracy
  • currency
• organise your information
• apply and communicate information effectively

These are important skills, not only for successful study but for a successful career and for lifelong learning.    Find out more about  these key  skills at  SCONUL's Seven Pillars of Information Literacy. 
 

If you need to improve your information skills here is how the Library can help -

Help & advice

If you're not sure how to use the library or how to go about finding the information you need, please ask for help.
 

Workshops programme

The workshops programme runs each Semester offering informal, presentation-style sessions for students on a range of information and study skills topics. 
 

Guides

If you not sure where or how to start looking for information, have a look at the Library's range of guides and subject guides.  These give advice on finding and using different types of resources.  We also have a series of blog posts on information skills with specific posts for searching for information, academic writing, citing & referencing and EndNote Web.

EndNote and EndNote Web

EndNote desktop and EndNote Web are tools you can use to help with academic writing. They allow you to collect, organise and format  references for in-text citations, reference lists and bibliographies. Workshops and one-to-one help available.
 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism involves taking ideas, writings or inventions of another person and using these as if they were your own, whether intentionally or not. Most of the writing you'll do at University will involve making use of and building on the work of others.  This is acceptable as long as their contribution is identified and fully acknowledged. Plagiarism occurs where there is no acknowledgement that the writings or ideas belong to or have come from another source.

The University produces a student guide to plagiarism (also available in Chinese and Arabic) which explains more about it and how to avoid it.

University staff and students also use Turnitin plagiarism detection software to check work for plagiarism.  This matches your text against a continually updated database of  content from the web, online publications and over 100 million student papers and then produces an originality report.  Submission of course work for checking is usually done through a link in your Vision course.

Workshops are available topics to help with avoiding plagiarism such as citing and referencing, EndnoteWeb and using Turnitin.