The Newcastle University Liaison team is here to support you as you develop the academic skills you need to succeed in your studies. We can help you develop the skills you need to find, evaluate and manage the academic information required for your studies and research. There are a range of online resources you can access remotely as a student or researcher at Newcastle University to help you focus on skills areas where you would like to grow in confidence or areas of weakness identified in feedback.
Academic Skills Kit
The Academic Skills Kit (ASK) offers advice on developing your academic skills including writing, good academic practice, preparing for assessment, time management, presentations and a broad range of other study skills.
The ASK website includes study guides, practice exercises, evaluative tools and quizzes. New resources are being added all the time so check back for more study skills advice coming in the future.
The content on the ASK website is primarily focused on undergraduate and postgraduate taught students, although it does include useful tips for everyone. Postgraduate researchers will find additional training and resources to support your skills and personal development through the Postgraduate Researcher Development Programme.
Referencing
Referencing is how you acknowledge the source of the information you have used (referred to) in your work. It helps to make clear to the reader how you have used the work of others to develop your own ideas and arguments.
Whether you are quoting directly from a book, summarising an idea from a journal article, illustrating a point with an image, or paraphrasing an opinion from a newspaper article, you need to give credit to the original creator of the work.
The Managing Information Guide will help you gain more detailed knowledge of why we reference in academic work and how to format your references in an agreed style for your subject area. You'll also find some useful advice on the ASK website.
Reference Management Tools
Keeping track of all your references and making sure you consistently follow your referencing style might seem a little daunting, but there are lots of referencing tools that can help you manage and format your citations and references correctly.
- Look out for cite options on Library Search, Google Scholar and subject databases.
- Generate citations and bibliographies using reference building tools such as Cite This for Me or ZoteroBib.
- Explore reference management software such as EndNote, Mendeley or Zotero.
You will find useful tips and guidance or reference management software on the Managing Information Guide. Take some time as you begin your studies, dissertation or research to judge if a referencing tool will be of value to you.
EndNote
EndNote is a desktop and online application for storing and managing references. As well as finding and collecting reference data and full-text PDFs, it can help make your academic life a little easier by creating bibliographies and inserting citations into your documents as you write.
As a student of Newcastle University, you have free access to the EndNote software. You have access to EndNote through the Windows Virtual Desktop and have the option to use the EndNote Online version.
If you decide that EndNote will work well for you to help you manage your references, visit our EndNote Guide for step-by-step workbooks to help you get started.
