Here you will find sessions and resources specifically targeted at PGR Researchers.
The programme currently runs three times a year.
We aim to make sessions available via our Library Training calendar approx. 6 weeks before each programme commences. Sessions available in current programmes will be shown in the calendar on the right of this page.
Sessions are usually on Teams or Zoom. Further details will be available once you have booked.
Open Research for sessions on all aspects of open research, including open access, FAIR data principles, responsible metrics and more.
Engage @ Liverpool is a cross-faulty research and methods initiative and a centre partner of the National Centre for Research Methods and provides training opportunities.
Altmetric helps you track who has been talking about your research online in places like Twitter, blogs, news websites, policy documents etc. and can help you to engage people outside of academia with your research.
At the end of this session you should:
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. You can connect your iD with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more.
Ready to publish your first paper and not sure where to start? This webinar will give a brief overview of what you need to think about when choosing a journal to publish in, as well as the tools available to help find the right one for you.
After attending this session you should know:
More resources on publishing can be found on the Library's Open Access pages.
Please login at stream.liv.ac.uk to view this video
When working with personal or sensitive data it is essential that researchers know how to proceed. We present a series of 3 short videos produced by the University of Liverpool’s Data Protection Officer Dan Howarth explaining the law and how to navigate data protection for researchers.
When considering how to initiate and manage your research, you will of course be considering ethics and research integrity as well as GDPR.
On this page, we list some of the web-based tools available for researchers.
Unless indicated, if you need or would like further support on an application you should go online to the community and/or company concerned. The University does not have an institutional subscription to all these tools. If you wish to purchase a subscription for your research project, please check with IT Services first.
Digital Scholar LabThe Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a cloud-based research environment that allows students and researchers to apply natural language processing tools to raw text data (OCR) from Gale's Primary Sources in a single research platform. What Gale saysWhen performing analyses, finding, cleaning, and organising data, natural language processing (NLP) for historical texts is often a daunting task, especially when looking to generate meaningful results. Gale Digital Scholar Lab removes these barriers and streamlines the workflow process, allowing researchers to spend more time identifying previously undiscovered data, testing theories, analysing results, and gaining new insights. AccessYou can access the Digital Scholar Lab via the Library’s list of databases, which can be found on the Library Main Page under the Discover Search Bar. Choose Research Tools in the Database type section, it is listed alphabetically. You will have to sign in to get access to the tool and have a google account to create an account with Gale. |
Data AnalysisThe web is a valuable tool to help with understanding your data analysis problems whether you are a novice or an expert For those just starting or with some basic skills, there are the following. LinkedIn LearningThe University has a license for LinkedIn Learning. This provides video-based training for a wide range of topics. Under the topic of data analysis, there are 195 courses listed. These range from relatively short introductions to the topic, such as Learning Data Analytics to multi-session courses with 30+ hours of content. Some are self-contained, whilst others are best appreciated if you install the suggested application software and do exercises as you progress through the course. The Programming HistorianA popular text-based interactive site is The Programming Historian. As of August 2021, there are 86 lessons in English as well as a good range of courses in French, Spanish and Portuguese. These vary in difficulty with a range of topics covered. Several of these address data analysis needs relevant to the Humanities. |
OpenRefineOpenRefine is an Open Source tool that helps you explore, clean data and transform it from one format to another. It also allows your data to be augmented with data from other sources such as websites and web services. OpenRefine is a Java-based tool that runs via a small server on your local computer, this ensures privacy and means your data never leaves your system. Library Carpentry provides a useful introductory lesson, which includes sample data, in OpenRefine. |
AmnesiaAmnesia is a tool to transform personal data to anonymous data, which can then be used free of restrictions imposed by GDPR. It facilitates the replacement of unique values, or combinations of values, with more abstract ones. These abstractions can be saved and reapplied on similar data in the future. Amnesia can produce several solutions to fully anonymise a dataset, allowing the user to choose the most appropriate to the potential research application. Amnesia is Open Source and can be used under a 3-Clause BSD License. |
SketchEngineSketchEngine is an online language analysis tool. It allows users to study large collections of language use, known as corpora, mainly collected from different websites, to reveal insights into language, information, content, and communication. The corpora on SketchEngine each contain several billions of words of English, Romance languages, Arabic, Chinese, and so on. Data is tagged with information such as part of speech (noun, verb, etc) and syntactic position (subject, object, modifier, etc). Searches can reveal patterns and meanings of language employed by many speakers and writers or can contest or elucidate received wisdom about language use. SketchEngine users can also upload their own corpora for analysis. Access SketchEngine using the institutional login, using University credentials, with two-step identification. |
OmekaOmeka is a web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating online exhibitions. It’s widely used in the cultural heritage sector, but has wider applications for a range of humanities and arts research data, especially if you are interested in showcasing collections and sharing data with the public. The free, web-hosted version allows you to create a single site where you can upload images, audio, video, etc and apply rich, descriptive metadata using Dublin Core. If you need more sites and more storage, a range of pricing tiers are available. The open source, downloadable version of Omeka is even more powerful and versatile, although it may require some institutional IT support to run and maintain. Recording of recent Introduction to OMEKA session from Dr Victoria Stobo. An example of using Omeka to share research data (including crowd-sourced data): Hermoupolis Digital Heritage Management (Hermes). |
Visual abstracts are becoming popular tools for both journals and authors to help communicate and disseminate research. This video will explain what visual abstracts are, why they are used and will demonstrate how to create a visual abstract in both Canva and PowerPoint.
View Visual Abstract in Stream for transcription options.
Research data relating to research that involves personal or special category data should be anonymised. Anonymisation reduces the risk of data breaches or mishandling and it is also an important element to sharing effectively.
This short video covers the concept of anonymisation. It is discipline agnostic.
Please login at stream.liv.ac.uk to view this video
What copyright issues should you take into account before submitting the final version of your thesis? What’s high risk and what’s low risk? How will readers gain access to your thesis after graduation? In this session, you will learn about the issues to consider when including material created by other people in your PhD thesis.
Overwhelmed with information? Not finding enough? This workshop will work through the stages of planning an effective search and using a database’s built-in search functionality to full effect. Learn how to cover all the bases to capture early, seminal and brand new research on your topic.
View Researcher KnowHow: Literature Searching on Stream.
This session would be particularly useful to those who have already attended the Knowhow session 'Introduction to Endnote' but also those who are familiar with the basics of endnote and want to know more about this referencing tool.
This workshop will cover:
Organising your library: Groups; Smart Groups; Annotating records; Duplicates; Saving/moving your Library
PDF handling: Attaching a PDF to a reference; Creating references from a folder of saved PDFs; Enable automatic importing; Annotating PDFs
Merging thesis chapters
Research Data Management and your PhD
You may be planning to collect a lot of data, to carry out lots of interviews, or create your own data in some way. Whatever you are going to be doing whilst carrying out your research, thinking about how you are going to manage that data, look after it safely, find it again and share it, is essential. This session, will go through the basics of research data management, discuss issues around dealing with sensitive data and data security and consider how you can create maximum impact by sharing your data.
Open access policies, the rising visibility of pre-prints, continued reforms of research assessment, financial pressures, all indicate that what is published, and how. An online live session from KnowHow will highlight some of the areas of change and reflect on engagement with scholarly publishing in the future.
This session is an introduction to systematic reviews and forms the first part of three sessions devoted to systematic reviews. Developing your review question is the important first step.
Alternatively, see the Getting started with a systematic review: developing your review question slides from University of Liverpool Library
This session is the second in the series on systematic reviews. There will be a live session on searching a database of published research, in this case, MEDLINE. The skills demonstrated to use this database are transferable to any subject or discipline. The session will be interactive with you practising simple searching skills, so you will need a computer or smart device with a keyboard.
Alternatively, see the Planning and doing a search for your systematic review slides from University of Liverpool Library on Slideshare.
Good research is systematic, disciplined and rigorous. It also has to reported clearly in a way that it can be reproduced and contested. The session will share advice and tips from experienced systematic review authors on how to plan and manage your search results, data extraction, quality assessment and reporting of your review.
Alternatively, view the slides for Doing your systematic review: managing data and reporting on SlideShare.
If you would like to improve your statistical skills, learn more about choosing appropriate tests or even if you are a beginner, take a look at the KnowHow statistics workshops/webinars coming up. For advanced statistics courses open to both staff and students, please see the Biostatistics page. There are also interactive tutorials available on Canvas covering different statistical topics.
If you are a student, you can also book a one to one appointment with one of our Stats@Liverpool tutors, who can help you with specific queries.
For demonstrations of performing most common statistical tests using SPSS, R and Stata see the KnowHow YouTube Channel.
