Research Tools

Using the Library Portal for your Research

The Library Portal is a comprehensive digital library offering access to thousands of journals and eBooks. It should be your first resource when starting your research for the latest peer reviewed information. To find out how to use the basic features of the Library Portal, you can visit our page for some top tips on how to get up and running.

What are Research Tools?

Research tools can be used to find, organise and manage information for your research and assignments. The Learning Success Hub provides a variety of tools to support your research and make it easy to find resources and manage citations effectively.

BrowZine

BrowZine is a journal platform that brings together all the academic journals in the Arden Library collection and allows you to browse by subject area, search by journal title, save articles for offline reading, and build a personal library. You can even set alerts for new issues to stay up to date with the latest research.

Open BrowZine

How to use BrowZine

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature. You can use Google Scholar to search for academic books, articles, theses and case law, across a wide range of subjects and sources. You can also adjust your settings so Google Scholar will provide links to resources through Arden’s Library Portal if there is full text availability.

Go to Google Scholar

How to use Google Scholar

Google Scholar

LibKey Nomad

When searching the internet for academic resources, you can download and use the LibKey Nomad browser extension to tell you if a journal article you’re searching for is open access or available in Arden’s Library collection.

Open LibKey Nomad

How to use LibKey Nomad

LibKey Nomad

LibKey.io

LibKey.io is a research tool you can use to save time and pinpoint the journal article you are looking for. It allows you to search by using the article’s unique digital object identifier (DOI) or Pub Med identifier (PMID) to get one-click access to full-text article you are looking for if the article is available in the Library’s collection or via open access.

Open LibKey IO

Reference Management Tools

Reference management software tools enable you to collect, organise and annotate all your academic resources in one place. These tools also work with text editing software, such as Microsoft Word and LibreOffice, to create references and bibliographies in many styles and formats.

Open Mendeley

Open Zotero

How to use Mendeley

Workshops

Advanced Library Searching

The Identifying a Research Topic workshop is for if you are starting to think about your final year research project. Dissertations are an essential part of your degree; it is your chance to work independently on something that you are passionate about. The workshop will help you generate ideas for research topics, assess whether the topic could realistically be carried out and get you started on the first stages of researching your topic.

Book a Place

Boolean Searching and the Library

This workshop builds on the skills learned in the Advanced Library Searching workshop. It will introduce Boolean operators and give you the opportunity to practice advanced searching skills.

Book a Place

Evaluating Resources

Good quality, reliable resources are the starting point for any research. This workshop will explore practical techniques for assessing and evaluating information from a range of sources, and practice using some of the tools that can help you.

Book a Place