Graduate Research

As a graduate student, you may be planning a literature review for a research project/proposal or reviewing the literature for a course assignment. Literature reviews serve as a foundation for topics and help situate a project and research questions within the existing literature. Broadly speaking, conducting a literature review involves locating, evaluating, and selecting high-quality sources, and then writing a synthesis of the sources you select.

To learn about time-strategies for locating articles published in peer-reviewed (refereed) journals and other sources -- and tips on managing and citing sources, consider attending the workshop sessions below. The sessions are presented in collaboration with the College of Graduate Studies in the Pathways to Success program. To see a full list of sessions we are offering this semester, please see our Graduate Workshops @UCF Libraries. 

For questions, please contact Corinne Bishop, Graduate Engagement Librarian corinne.bishop@ucf.edu

• Finding & Using Academic Sources
  This session highlights time-saving steps to locate academic sources for upcoming course assignments and literature reviews. Learn how to locate peer-reviewed articles and related sources for topics, identify relevant subject-databases and background information, develop a plan for reviewing sources, and tips to maximize Google Scholar.
   
• Citing and Managing Sources
  This session covers citing basics for academic writing and includes guidelines for using direct quotes and paraphrased text, formatting in-text citations and references, style guide resources (APA & MLA), and ideas for note taking and managing sources. 
   
• EndNote Citations Management Tool
  Citation management tools allow you to dedicate more time to research. Join us to learn how to export citations from library databases, organize citations, generate bibliographies, and format citations in a Word document. EndNote can help make managing your references and formatting citations easy. 
   
• Zotero Citation Management Tool
  Zotero is a free citation tool. Features allow you to organize sources for projects, import citations from databases, save PDFs, select citation formatting styles, add in-text citations and bibliographies in Word, and create groups for resource sharing.