University of Sheffield Discover Study Skills Online is a collection of online resources geared to helping sixth form students improve their study techniques, get the best out of their post-16 studies and help prepare for transition to university.
Newcastle University Library Study Skills for 6th Form
Edinburgh Napier Unibersity How to Study Guide
JSTOR’s Research Basics course is a free and open online course designed to help students learn academic research skills, and is ideal for EPQ students. Research Basics is not specific to JSTOR, but covers a range of key research skills broadly applicable to academic research. The course consists of three modules with three lessons each, practice quizzes, and assessments for each module. Students can take the self-paced course in their own time, and will learn about effective searching, evaluating credibility, and properly citing sources.
Leeds University is launching a new MOOC, “Critical Thinking at University: An Introduction”. This is a two week course that will run on Future Learn as part of its Study Skills. Primarily aimed at first year undergraduate students it would be ideal for EPQ students.
Recommended online resources
MyJSTOR – Register for a free account to access up to six article a month for free. These are peer reviewed, academic journal articles, ideal for your EPQ research.
Unpaywall An open database of more than 18,000,000 free Open Access scholarly articles from over 50,000 publishers and repositories.
Get the Research A brand new search engine developed by ImpactStory (who make Unpaywall), Internet Archive and the British Library. You can apply for early access now.
CORE CORE’s mission is to aggregate open access research from repositories and journals and make them available to the public, facilitating free, unrestricted access to research for everyone.
JStor Open Content Explore academic content on JSTOR that is open to everyone, everywhere. Search thousands of free journal articles and open access book chapters.
White Rose Research Online
Shared, open access repository from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (the White Rose of Yorkshire).
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Multi-disciplinary online directory of open access, peer-reviewed journals
Europe PubMed Central Biomedical and health sciences
arXiv arXiv is an e-print service from Cornell University in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
Cambridge Journals free content
Multi-disciplinary
Oxford Journals Open Access Multi-disciplinary
Stanford University/Highwire Press free content
Sciences
Sage Journals free trials
Multi-disciplinary
Wiley Open Access
Multi-disciplinary
Elsevier Open Access
Multi-disciplinary
Free Medical Journals
Health and medicine
Open Access Journals Multi-disciplinary
ABC Chemistry
Chemistry
BioMed Central Journals
BioMedical
Further information
A new search engine for open-access research will be launched this autumn.
Get the Research will connect the public with 20 million open-access scholarly articles. The site will be built by Impactstory, the nonprofit organisation who make Unpaywall, in conjunction with the Internet Archive and the British Library.
Read more at https://ihenow.com/2NDufe9
A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
A useful article from Scientific American that demonstrates that students who used longhand to take notes remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material that those who took notes using a laptop.
Undertaking an Extended Project Qualification, IB extended essay or any other scholarly research? This guides you step-by-step.
This is a free course from the University of Southampton that would be ideal for anyone doing the EPQ.
If you need to convert files from one format to another, Zamzar is a really useful online site where you can convert on the fly without needing to download software.
You can convert loads of different formats, for text, image, audio and video files, including PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, DOC to PDF as well as many others.
“We are overwhelmed by a torrent of information: 900,000 blog posts, 50 million tweets, more than 60 million Facebook status updates and 210 billion emails are sent off into the electronic ether every day.”
Eric Schmidt, the Google executive, “likes to point out that if you recorded all human communications from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.”Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (2011)