Academic skills for students

Reading and literature reviews

Finding and reading relevant literature efficiently is an important skill. However, identifying what’s relevant, and making sense of it once you find it, can both be non-trivial problems. The posts below explain why literature reviews are useful, and how to handle them efficiently and well.

• Doing online searches
• Finding the right references, part 1
• Finding the right references, part 2
• Finding the right references, part 3
• Making the most of bad references
• The purpose of literature reviews
• Literature reviews
• A quick and dirty approach to reviewing the literature
• Using review articles to get an overview of the literature
• Doing meta-analysis, and Systematic Literature Reviews

Academic writing

Academic writing is very different from business writing, journalistic writing, etc. There are good reasons for this, but they are seldom explained to students. These posts unpack the reasons, and describe ways of signalling your strength and knowledge through your writing.

• Why is scientific writing so boring?
• Different writing styles for different purposes
• Useful writing tips for stressed students
• The underlying structure of scientific writing
• The three golden rules of scientific writing
• Humour: Getting that ‘special’ paper published