New Years Resolutions?

2016 photoNew Years Resolutions. They’re traditional, well-intentioned, and almost always broken within the first week. Usually, they tend to be about being “better”; improving the way we do something, making more sensible choices, or having a positive impact on our health, wealth or work.

In a non-scientific and potentially unrepresentative survey (which I carried out on library staff here during the first days back from the holidays), I discovered that as well as the usual diets and exercise plans, many people mentioned wanting to be more efficient with their time, be more organised, and surround themselves with nicer stationary. Well OK, I’ll admit that the stationary part may just be a librarian thing, but I’m guessing that many of our students (and staff in other departments) will have had similar thoughts about being organised and efficient?

Here’s the good news – we can help you with this!

Our Discovery search can help you to be far more efficient in your literature searching. Not only does it search across a huge range of databases at once, it also enables you to filter and refine the results until you get exactly what you’re looking for! It provides links to literally hundreds of thousands of journal articles, in full text, which you can download or print, and it can even help you to stay organised by saving the references to the articles you find to your chosen reference management tool.

Which leads me nicely on to…. reference management tools. There are loads out there. You can find EndNote (which we really like) through the Application Jukebox on all University PC’s and laptops, and the web version is available for those on the move. Using a reference management tool can save you loads of time as well as ensuring you keep track of the research you’ve done, especially on those bigger projects.

If you’re trying to work out whether the referencing you’ve done in your essay is correct, there’s only really one place to go, and that’s Referencing@Portsmouth! It provides all the definitive answers about UoP referencing styles in an easy to use format, where you select the type of material you’re using to generate reference templates and examples. It’ll even show you how to create your in text citations. So don’t waste time on dodgy advice, just go straight to the oracle!

Of course there is one superb resource that can help with literature searching and referencing as well as all kinds of other things from accessing e-resources to advice on copyright (and if you’re really that curious, probably where to find nice stationary too). And that’s our staff. We’re available at the enquiry desk, on the upper floors (look out for our purple lanyards!), by email, online chat and telephone.  And when we’re not around, you can get help from our out-of-hours team, who will refer on your query to us if they can’t answer it.

So you see, with a little help from the Library, your new years resolutions are entirely achievable! Saying that though, let’s be realistic… for help with fitness related resolutions, the staff in Sport & Recreation may be better placed to answer your questions…

 

Photo by geralt (Pixabay)

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