English and Comparative Literary Studies: Research Support

The Research and Academic Services team are part of the University Library. They include librarians and research specialists dedicated to supporting research students and staff at the University of Warwick.

The team provides research support services in the areas of literature searching, reference management, open research, research data management, and digital scholarship.

Your primary contact is your Research and Academic Support Librarian who can provide subject specialist library support for your department, and can signpost you to other research support services within the library.

Research and Academic Services also includes specialist research support teams in open research, research data and digital scholarship.

Open Research
Yvonne Budden, Open Research Manager
openaccessfund@warwick.ac.uk 

Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP)
WRAP is Warwick's open research repository
publications@warwick.ac.uk

Research Data
To be appointed, Research Data Manager
researchdata@warwick.ac.uk 

Sage Research Methods (SRM) is an online learning platform for researchers, with a wide range of resources to support quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods including a project planner, methods map, and many books, case studies and datasets. 

• Login to Sage Research Methods
• Sage Research Methods LibGuide

Get It For Me is the library's document supply service. It allows researchers to request resources not currently available in the library. To request items, simply complete the relevant request form. The library has a digital first policy and will acquire electronic resources where possible.

• Book: request purchase of a new book or ebook, and/or inter-library loan from another library
• Chapter: request digitisation of a chapter in a book
• Article: request digitisation of an article in a journal
• Postal Loan: request postal loan of a print only book from library's collection

If you are interested in a trial or subscription to a new journal or database, please contact your Research and Academic Support Librarian.

Researchers to keep up-to-date with new publications in their discipline. The library's journals and databases include current awareness tools which can alert you to new articles, issues of journals, and citations to articles.

• Journals: find the journal homepage on the publisher's website and register to receive email alerts to newly published articles and issues. 
• JournalTOCs: sign-up to alerting service to receive email alerts to newly published articles from a journal and across a discipline.
• Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and other subject specialist databases allow you receive email alerts to newly published articles.

Your Research and Academic Support Librarian can help you use current awareness services. Contact your librarian to book a 1-2-1 appointment.

The library provides advice and guidance on managing your Research Data to ensure that you meet policy and funder requirements. From initial planning, during your active research phase, to archiving and sharing data at the end of your research project.

• Research Data Management & Planning: an online library course introducing research data management (RDM).
• Data Management Plan (DMP): guidance on writing your data management plan with links to DMPOnline.
• Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP): the university's open access repository for research data and outputs.

The library's Research Data Management team can advise on all aspects of RDM including planning, organising, accessing and sharing research data. Contact the RDM team researchdata@warwick.ac.uk to ask a question, book a 1-2-1 appointment or group training session.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides a suite of data-analysis tools for research in the digital humanities.
Work with any digital primary source material, using the tools to interrogate content, develop insights and output discoveries, Gale Digital Scholar Lab can help:

• Perform analyses
• Find, clean, and organise data,
• Apply natural language processing (NLP) to historical texts

Through advanced humanities computing tools that make NLP for historical texts accessible, more efficient, and impactful, the footprint of digital humanities can be expanded to any project at any level.

Watch our  Gale Digital Scholar Lab Resource of the Month Webinar from Febuary

AM Research Skills helps to develop the skills needed to interact with primary sources in research. It introduces how to find, understand, and critically evaluate sources of information allowing for the exploration of concepts and methods using relevant source material, expert essays and case studies.

The essays, videos and case studies included aim to share methodological advice on everything from archival collection practice to ways of conducting research and organising your writing. These are accompanied by primary source examples and data sets for putting the skills developed into practice.

Each Case Study in AM Research Skills focuses on a specific digitised primary source, revealing how scholars approach evaluating different types of source or themes in history. Case studies are structured in a way that helps you work through the steps a scholar may take when interacting with the source, which will be embedded in each case so you can follow any analysis or see any specific images that they cite. 

The library offers a wide range of bibliographic databases to support literature searching:

• Library Search is the library's general catalogue and search engine.
• Scopus and Web of Science index articles from high quality academic journals across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences.
• Subject specialist databases. 

The library offers a Literature Searching for Researchers training session, and your Research and Academic Support Librarian can help you plan literature searches and use databases to find academic literature. Contact your librarian to book a 1-2-1 appointment.

The library provides advice and guidance on plagiarism and referencing to students and researchers.

• Avoiding Plagiarism: an online library course introducing plagiarism and how to avoid it.
• Introduction to Referencing: an online library course introducing Harvard referencing.
• Referencing styles: referencing guidance for departments across the University of Warwick.

Your Research and Academic Support Librarian can advise on the [NAME OF REFERENCING STYLE] referencing style and other referencing conventions used in your discipline. Contact your librarian to ask a question or book a 1-2-1 appointment. 

Cite Them Right Online is the University of Warwick's interactive referencing tool. It has rules and tutorials for referencing all key resource types across 8 major referencing styles including APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, MHRA, MLR, OSCOLA and Vancouver.

To access Cite Them Right Online, click on Login > Login via your Institution > University of Warwick.

The library provides advice and guidance on managing literature using reference management software.

• Collect and save references in an online database.
• Organise references by topic + add research notes and PDFs.
• Share references with research collaborators or project groups.
• Cite references in Microsoft Word in your referencing style.
• Create a Bibliography in Microsoft Word in your referencing style.

EndNote: the University provides EndNote reference management software, and the library provides EndNote user guides, training and ongoing support. If you want to learn how to use EndNote, the library runs EndNote workshops as part of the researcher development programme. Additionally, your Research and Academic Support Librarian can advise on reference management software. Contact your librarian to ask a question or book a 1-2-1 appointment. Alternatively, contact endnoteweb@warwick.ac.uk. 

The library provides advice and guidance on Open Access (OA) publishing to ensure that you meet policy and funder requirements, including compliance with the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The library also manages the university's subscriptions to Read and Publish journals, funds for Article Processing Charges (APCs), and the Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) our open access research repository.

• Understanding Open Access: an online library course introducing open access (OA) research and publishing.
• Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP): the university's open access repository for research data and outputs.
• Publishing in a Digital Environment: an online library course on how to publish in journals and books.

The library's Open Access team can advise on all aspects of open access including policy, funding, compliance and open access articles and monographs. Contact the OA team openaccessfund@warwick.ac.uk to ask a question, book a 1-2-1 appointment or group training session.

Systematic Reviews are a very structured way of reviewing the research literature. Originally developed in the health and medical sciences, Systematic Reviews utilise a detailed and methodical literature search. Elements of the Systematic Review are being adopted more widely across other disciplines.

Systematic Literature Search is the approach to searching and selecting literature within a Systematic Review, but are not by themselves a full review. They are an increasingly popular research method in the social sciences and can be be applied to arts and humanities research where extensive identification of secondary sources is needed.

The key elements of a systematic literature search are to:

• record the search process
• share your search strategies
• document the references retrieved
• report how you selected/screened the references to find the papers for the final review.

Speak to your Research and Academic Support Librarian if you are thinking of applying systematic approaches in your research.

If you want to learn more about systematic literature searches, the library runs a Literature Searching for Researchers workshop as part of the researcher development programme.

Resources.

• Warwick Library tutorial: Conducting a systematic literature search
• King’s College London: Searching for Systematic Reviews and Evidence Synthesis
• Cherry, Boland & Dickson: Doing a systematic review: a student’s guide