3 useful research tools
Photo: © Photographer Bjarke MacCarthy
At CBS Library we are very keen on identifying and delivering services for that will help our students complete their degrees in the best possible way. Our approach is multi facetted but one important area of action is to provide access to study and research tools that will help you save time and money and that are better alternatives to free online products with their inherent limitations. We have listed 3 useful tools that can make working with your tasks easier.
Questionnaires - use Qualtrics
You will probably need to conduct a survey at some point in the course of your studies. The library offers access to Qualtrics, a software that allows you to create, distribute, and analyse queries. Qualtrics is available to all CBS students from the library website.
Keep track of your literature with Mendeley
”If I had I only known earlier on…” is a frequent comment from students after being introduced to Mendeley, a reference management tool that allows you to keep track of the literature used in your papers.
This is important as you will need to save key information for all the sources that you use in your papers, a task Mendeley performs really well. At the same time Mendeley can help you be more efficient as the software makes it easy to insert correctly formatted in-text citations into your document as well as create complete bibliographies, all with just a click of the mouse.
Every semester CBS Library offers introductory Mendeley workshops and courses.
Find a course in our calendar. You can also explore the system on your own and a good place to start is this Mendeley Guide with its online tutorials.
Analyse your qualitative data using NVivo
If you working with qualitative data and do you need to get to the bottom of it, NVivo is your tool. NVivo is a platform for working with and analyzing all types and formats of qualitative data, including prose text, interviews, audio, and video. Use NVivo for simple word frequency analyses and more sophisticated semantic parsing based on coding.
NVivo allows you to identify trends and to dive deep into your data, irrespective of volume and character.