Hotze, M.FZJ* ; Schmahl, I.FZJ*

2025

Abstract: The workshop was designed by the Information Services team at the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich. It is for doctoral researchers and PhD students at the beginning of their doctoral thesis. The systematic review method from the field of medicine provides the basis, but we have simplified this approach here. The workshop takes one day and is conducted by a team of two trainers. In the first part in the morning, we introduce a simple version of a systematic review. This introduction is accompanied by exercises. The participants are given a template and examples, and are asked to select suitable search terms and use them to develop search queries for their own topic. Participants learn about interdisciplinary search sources and their features for analysing the results. The second part of the workshop is held in the afternoon and is divided into two subtopics. Participants are first introduced to literature management. The reference management programmes EndNote and Zotero are used as examples to show how the features can be used to organize the literature found, document the searches, and create a bibliography. Then, we take a closer look at literature searches. Participants learn about subject-specific databases that allow them to search not only for literature but also for data. The workshop concludes with an introduction to searching for research data as another type of data in research that has become increasingly important in recent years. Recognizing your own information needs and the ability to search for information systematically and store it in a structured way are the key to the planning and performing your own research work, and this impact should not be underestimated. This workshop aims to provide participants with a method that is easy to implement and that is based on a proven quality standard from medicine. It also aims to make participants aware of the diversity of information that is available and teach them where it can be sourced in scientific research.