Starting your final research project?

From primary sources to referencing: support for every step on the path to a successful final project.

If you’re a finalist or taught postgrad, you're probably thinking about your final research project. We’re here to support you throughout your dissertation or final project with a wealth of resources that can help.

Final Chapter

The Final Chapter resource will be indispensable throughout your project. Tutors, students and Skills@Library all give tips and advice for every stage of your project. To begin with, the “starting your project” section guides you through the process of choosing your topic and developing your questions.

Researching your project

Research projects often need a more in-depth and wide-ranging literature search than assignments. When you’re ready to start your research, there’s lots of material available online at Library Search, or through click and collect. There are more online resources than ever, as we increased the number of ebooks and online resources during the pandemic.

Subject databases are a great place to start your research. Our Search Help and Resource Guides will help you find what you’re looking for. If there’s something specific you need that we don’t hold in our collections, you can suggest a purchase or request it through our Document Supply service.

Primary sources for arts, humanities and social sciences research are often found in print collections, which might be difficult to access at the present time. Use our new Primary Sources Resource Guide, which gathers all our online primary source resources into one place. Special Collections also have rare and unique research material that might support your project. We have digitised a lot of our material and made it available online!

Referencing

Referencing can be time-consuming. Use EndNote to compile your references while you research to make referencing much smoother. You can download EndNote to use off-campus and follow our guides to get the most out of it.

Find your school’s referencing style and help to reference many different types of resource in our referencing guides.

Statistics and analysis

Presenting research data may also factor into your dissertation (check out our blog post “Using data in your dissertation”). Our dedicated statistics tutors can support you to generate statistics and use statistical analysis software. Workshops are released on a regular basis and there is one-to-one support available.

Dissertation examples and writing up

You can view dissertation examples online to get a feel for how your finished project should look. There's also support for academic writing and delivering oral presentations and poster presentations.