The Library provides support for research students through your entire journey at Essex. If there is anything you would like us to add to our support or you have any questions, please let us know.
Jump to what you need to know:
The Library and its teams provide support to students and staff on all three campuses. You can borrow resources, use study spaces, and speak to staff on any campus, regardless of where you are usually based.
The most up-to-date information about opening hours and other service updates is available online. If you have a query and don't know who to reach out to, contact us via email and our friendly team will direct you to the right place.
The best way to stay up to date with the support offered by the Library and other teams is to join the Newcomers mailing list. Newcomers is a network of PGRs and other early career researchers that aims to share training and support throughout the year.
Every January, the Newcomers Team also hosts Newcomers Research Week - a week of training aimed at introducing key research topics.
The Library provides support and training for a range of skills through our Skills at Library programme. As a PGR, you may already be familiar with a lot of what it covers, but it's a great refresher you can refer to as you need, especially if you're new to studying in the UK or have been out of higher education for a while.
You can use the library skills audit and course overview page to identify the topics it might be useful for you to revisit to ensure you have the information skills you need to succeed in your studies and research.
Dive into some of the key areas it covers:
Each department also has a dedicated librarian who provides support and resources tailored to your subject. You can find this support through your Subject Guide, which contains information relevant to your department, including the best databases to find relevant content and any subject-specific variations or practices you should be aware of.
You or a group can also book a meeting with a librarian, where you can discuss queries you have on finding representative literature, evaluating sources, referencing, and more.
We regularly advertise our workshops through the Library Events Calendar, our social media, Newcomers mailing list, and PG News, so keep an eye on each to see what's coming up.
Other teams at the University also provide a variety of training via Proficio and CareerHub .
A great way to develop your reviewing and writing skills is to read others' work.
You can volunteer as a peer reviewer for the Essex Student Journal, a formal academic journal that publishes the work of Essex undergraduate and PGT students.
The Library runs the Journal and provides training for PGRs who want to volunteer as reviewers. If you are seeking to continue in academia, peer review is somewhat expected, so getting some early experience in a supportive environment is a great way to get started! Even outside of academia, being able to give effective feedback is a vital skill and can help you develop your own writing too. Sign up today!
All the support and opportunities highlighted above are available throughout your studies, so be sure to take a look and take advantage of them!
If you have any questions, you can contact the Research Support Team or the wider library and we'll do our best to help you with your queries.
Through your Training Needs Analysis, you will have thought about what areas and skills you need to develop. The Skills at Library programme, can help you refresh and develop key skills such as finding and evaluating literature, referencing, and being an engaged researcher.
The Skills at Library content ends by getting you to start thinking about how you will disseminate your work. This is where the Research Support Team can help you. Thinking about getting your work out there now is important, especially if you intend to stay in academia after you graduate. We provide training and support for researchers on key topics to help you share your work, such as:
The best place to keep up to date with our training sessions are the Library Events Calendar and Newcomers mailing list, as all of our researcher-specific training (and more!) will be shared there.
We do our best to keep up to date with what you need, but if you have any specific requests or suggestions, we're happy to hear them (the creation of this page was in response to PGR feedback!) Simply get in touch and we'll see what we can do.
As a PGR, there are multiple ways you can gain experience and skills through the Essex Student Journal.
You can volunteer as a peer reviewer. This is a great way to develop your feedback skills and read a wide range of literature produced by our undergraduate and PGT students. Reading and feeding back on the work of others helps to hone your own writing skills, as it gets you thinking about what does and doesn't work effectively so you can apply it to your own writing. If you intend to stay in academia, there is generally an expectation that academics peer review in their field, so you can get ahead of the curve with training and a supportive environment here at Essex. Furthermore, as well as gaining great experience for yourself, you'll be helping provide a unique service and opportunity to the wider student community.
Additionally, each year we hire the Student Journal Editor from our current PGRs. This is a paid part-time role where you can gain first-hand experience of the academic publishing process by guiding the work of our authors from initial submission through peer review and editing to final publication. The Editor is involved in a wide range of activities, such as promoting the Journal and helping organise events like the Essex Student Journal Conference, so it's a great opportunity to bolster your CV. Recruitment for this role usually happens over the summer, so keep an eye out if you're interested!
Whilst the Library cannot provide advice on writing your thesis, one thing we can help with is copyright considerations.
If you have any questions about copyright that are not covered by the thesis copyright guidance, we have more copyright guidance on the Library website and you can contact the team with specific queries that we'd be happy to help you with.
Once you have successfully completed your degree, you need to upload your thesis to the Repository. The Repository is maintained by the Research Support Team in the Library, so get in touch if you have any queries.
You continue to have full access to the Library up until you graduate, and alumni still have access to most of the Library, so be sure to make the most of it.
If you volunteer as a peer reviewer for the Essex Student Journal before you graduate, you can continue to review after you leave or move elsewhere. This can be a great way to stay in touch and continue contributing to the Essex community whilst keeping your own skills sharp! Just make sure we have accurate contact details when you leave Essex.
If you're continuing your academic career at Essex, you still have access to the Library plus even more of what the Research Support Team does becomes relevant to you.
Once your thesis is deposited in the Repository, we can make sure it appears on your staff profile page. Use this quick 1-minute form to give us some info so we can link things together.
We also offer a wide range of other support for publishing, copyright, increasing your visibility, and more. Simply take a look at how the Library can help new academic staff and the rest of our support for researchers to get started.
Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
