In this session we look at how to come up with a workable research question with regard to available literature: is there enough information to provide a suitable background? What limits will you need to set? It's a session which is ideal for anyone about to start on a dissertation or thesis. We explore a range of different sources including academic, government and organisational literature.

There's a lot of stuff to find. How can you find the things you really need? In this bitesized session, we show you some advanced literature searching tricks.

"...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.