Literature Review: Support for Higher Degree Research: Present

You understand the difference between summarising reports and documents, both verbally and in writing, and synthesizing information from a variety of sources.

Critically evaluating and synthesizing information from a variety of sources is one of the key characteristics of postgraduate study. You need to add value to the articles that you have read by comparing and discussing the different views that researchers hold or the techniques that they have used. You are exploring the reason for the differing approaches taken to the problem. You are critically evaluating the methodologies taken, the assumptions used during the research that has been reported and exploring the credibility and reliability of their results. All this will help to add knowledge to the subject area. Further discussion of critical evaluation is given in the Study Guide Critical Thinking.

You understand  how your research will be peer reviewed, evaluated and disseminated. You understand that you can actively create new knowledge through traditional publishing as well as through open source routes and also through the use of social media, such as blogs, social networking sites, discussion lists.

Maximizing the Impacts of Your Research: A handbook for social scientists published in 2011 was developed by staff at the London School of Economics, Imperial College and the University of Leeds to provide systematic guidance to researchers on how to maximise the academic impacts of their research through citations. Previous to this handbook, researchers had to rely on informal knowledge and random tips from their own and others' experience. LSE's Impact Blog updates the information contained within the Handbook.

Measuring your research impact developed by University librarians in Ireland is a tutorial with supporting learning resources that advises researchers how to track their research impact, introduces bibliometrics and looks at journal rankings and analysis.

Publishers often provide advice to help authors publish in their own journals. The Emerald Group, for example, publishes its Guide to getting published and Taylor & Francis publishes advice on its Author Services page on ensuring your research makes an impact.

The University of Manchester Library, University of York Library and Skills@Library at the University of Leeds have developed a Student guide to social media to help you use common social media tools in the context of your academic work.

Vitae's Online Research Communities list includes details of all those communities of value to postgraduate researchers such as Methodspace, Academia.edu and ResearchGATE.

Journal Citation Reports, published by Thomson Reuters, remains the recognised authority for evaluating journals and for details of journal impact factors which are published annually.

Scimago provides journal and country rankings taken from information contained in Elsevier's Scopus database.

Anne-Wil Harzing's Journal Quality List now in its 62nd edition, collects journal rankings from rankings of business and management journals by the FT and conducted by particular Business Schools. She presents them by title, by subject area and by ISSN. The list has been designed to help research staff to target their research papers at journals of an appropriate standard. The Chartered Association of Business Schools has updated its Academic Journals Guide for 2018. It is used by business academics and provides a tool to enhance the process of assessing journal quality.

Individual academic papers may well have been published to rank the relevance of journals in your specific subject area.

CAS Study Guide: Critical thinking.

Peter Samuels worked for the Centre for Academic Success where he provided advice on writing for publication including journal publication tips.

University of Manchester's Academic Phrasebank: Discussing findings.