Overview of Our Research Support Services

The Doctoral Research Support Program (DRSP) seeks to provide cohesive research support, customized for doctoral students, that will addresses their general as well as multidisciplinary scholarly needs. The DRSP Team will provide the following:

Support for general queries through email;
One-on-one consultation to develop strategies for short-term and long-term research projects, strategies that will incorporate resources at local, national, and international levels;
Training workshops that empower doctoral students to document and manage information and conduct literature reviews.

In addition to the DRSP services, doctoral students can also schedule research consultations with subject librarians and utilize other research services at the University Library.

Information Management

Doctoral students interact with vast quantities of information from numerous sources that come in many formats and in various languages.  It is a daunting challenge to manage and document information repeatedly and for multiple projects, especially when established scholars find they want to use a source they encountered while working on a past project, but can no longer precisely identify. We will review different types of citations and teach students how to choose among the various citation management systems. In addition, instructors will discuss note-taking strategies to curate and store information effectively.

Literature Reviews

There are many approaches to conducting a near-comprehensive literature review. The spark could be a footnote, an online reference to a case study, or through informal discussions with advisors and peers. Tracking published literature in any discipline or subject matter requires strategy. Students will learn about general and subject-specific indexing and abstracting resources, search techniques, and interacting with collections held at the University of Illinois and beyond.

One-on-One Consultations

Throughout the duration of the program, members of the DRSP team will be conducting one-on-one research consultations with interested participants. These consultations are designed to help participants develop strategies for short-term and long-term research projects, strategies that will incorporate resources at local, national, and international levels.

As mentioned on our home page, we offer research support and consultation office hours twice a week:

Wednesday: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm 
Thursday: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm 
https://uiuc.libcal.com/appointments/drsp