Where do you start when looking at academic literature? How can you successfully engage with the literature you find? This bitesized tutorial explores the structure of academic articles, shows where to look to check the validity of findings, and offers tips for navigating online texts.

When you do a Google search or a search in the library, you will get a massive reading list. How do you choose which are the best texts? Who do you trust? Where do you get the most reliable data from? In this session you will learn how to select the most appropriate reading for the task you have to complete.

It's important to take an analytical approach to reading the texts you encounter. In the concluding part of our "Being critical" theme, we look at how to evaluate sources effectively, and how to develop practical strategies for reading in an efficient and critical manner.

Taking notes isn't just about what notes you take...it's also about where you take them.

There's no best place to take and store your notes. What is important is that you find an approach that works for you, ensuring that you can find your notes again when you need them and can access them however you want to. You might find one particular application is good for you, or you might use a combination of apps for different purposes, or use a notebook and an app, or even just use a notebook. We'll look at the features of some note-taking apps available at the University of York, but you may find other ones that suit you better.

Google Keep

Keep is Google's note-taking application. You can log into Keep in a web browser at keep.google.com or use the Keep apps for iOS and Android to use it on your phone or tablet.

Key features of Google Keep:

• Write notes in a sticky note format, with the ability to add a title, or add checkboxes to notes to turn into a to-do list.
• Handwrite and draw notes either in a web browser or on mobile apps, with some handwriting recognition features.
• Change the colour of notes and add labels for organisation.
• Use the mobile apps to record voice notes that have some transcription features.
• Turn a note into a Google Doc for futher formatting by clicking a Copy to Google Docs button.
• Share notes with others by adding Collaborators.

Google Keep is good for short notes or for making handwritten or spoken notes, particularly on the go. You might use it together with Google Docs, by making brief notes in Google Keep and then copying them to Google Docs to write up more fully or add other content.

Microsoft OneNote

In the resources for our Taking note of note taking applications session, we showcase some online note taking applications, looking at how you can annotate PDFs and other online documents to be efficient with you note taking.

"...it was just the quote I needed, but now I can't remember where I found it!"

How do you manage the sources you find? We take a look at how we can collect, manage and automatically cite references using reference management software.

Do you need to find published data to explore and support arguments in your work? Are you struggling to find the web’s most authoritative data sources? Here we look at a range of resources including the Economic and Social Data Service, and UN and OECD statistics.

At York there are two main survey tools: Google Forms and Qualtrics.

In the slides below we take a look at how they work, and consider the respective pros and cons of each.

An introduction to some principles of data visualisation, exploring the possibilities and hacks available, and taking a look at some tools

Pretty much everybody uses social media, but here we focus on the role tools like Twitter and Blogging can play in the academic landscape. We cover the challenges of using social media professionally rather than just personally, building a reputation, sharing an online portfolio and applying for jobs.

The Google Workspace applications enable you to work collaborative on documents, slides and sheets. This introduction provides an overview of some of the Google applications on offer that you can use for group work, such as writing your final report or presentation, organising meetings and sharing your findings. Make your group projects more efficient by tapping into the functionally offered using Google apps for collaboration.

PowerPoint and Google Slides include many under-exploited features that can help the creation of more effective presentations and other resources. Here we explore the principles of designing presentations, and how to convey your material to an audience.

Informative posters are an increasingly popular way to share information and research work at conferences and exhibitions, but what’s the best applications to use? Word? Publisher? Surprisingly good results can be obtained using PowerPoint which, although intended for presentations, shares many features with publishing applications. In this session we explain and demonstrate how to configure PowerPoint to enhance the quality of your images and text.

When producing academic writing such as a dissertation, you should be able to enjoy the helpful features in Microsoft Word. The presentation below includes screenshots and exercises to help you grasp the key elements of MS Word which will help you produce material to a professional standard as efficiently as possible. This includes content such as headers and footers, Styles and handling images.