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Taught Postgraduates support

Support for Masters and other taught postgraduate students

Using professional networks for your subject area

It is important to start thinking about developing your professional networks, making connections and keeping to with developments in your subject area right from the start of your postgraduate journey. Specialist mailing lists, social media feeds and sites/apps such as LinkedIn are all great places to start.  

JISCMail
Email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities.

Linkedin
According to their website over 225 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities

Research networks and communities

Managing updates: set alerts so that information is sent to you

You can spend a long time setting up a literature search on your favourite database and it would be time consuming to keep repeating this to check for new content.  It can also be difficult to know how often to check some sources as update frequency can vary – it could be daily, weekly or monthly.

There may also be websites you visit frequently, or blogs that you like to read, whether these are for academic topics, from experts in your field, job sites or just personal interest.  It may not be possible to find time to check for new information on each separate site every day – and you would not know if new information was available anyway.

 To help you with all of these you set up alerts so that the information comes directly to you rather than you having to find it every day.  This will save time and make your research more effective.

Use Table of Contents alerts

A table of contents (TOCs) alert will notify you with the table of contents from particular journals and articles that match searches for authors names or keywords from article titles

You can usually set up a TOCs alert through the publisher's home page for a journal, or use the services listed below.

  • JournalTOCs
    A database of Table of Contents (TOCs) from scholarly journals and a convenient single "one stop shop" interface to these TOCs.