This session is part of our Graduate School programme of research skills training. To stay informed of future courses and training events, sign up to receive email updates.
Being able to effectively read large amounts of academic literature as well as reading beyond the descriptive and being critical of what is written are essential skills for the researcher.
This session will:
This session is aimed at external postgraduates who are applying for, or are currently enrolled on, a PhD programme.
In the first part of this session we will consider approaches and techniques for effectively reading, absorbing, summarising and recording large amounts of academic literature. Students will be invited to share their own methods for tackling this common challenge. We will also discuss speed reading as a particular reading technique and learn more about what it involves.
In the second part of the session we invite you to look deeply at academic texts (particularly journal papers) rather than at the surface messages they are trying to disseminate. This goes beyond reading what the papers SAY, and examines what they DO and what the papers MEAN.
We will also explore how this would resonate with researcher positionality. This requires the reader to not just read for information but with and through academic ‘ways of thinking’. How we do this will be modelled by evaluating papers from both the social sciences and humanities and at the end of this session you will be invited to evaluate a key/seminal paper of your own.
Sarah Frodsham is Co-Director of the Graduate School and Chair of Ethics at Oxford Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education.
Alistair Beecher is Co-Director of the Graduate School and a history tutor at Oxford Lifelong Learning, Department for Continuing Education.
In 2024 we launched a trial series of research skills sessions open to postgraduate researchers external to the University and, due to the sucess of these, the sessions have run again each year since.
Each session is independent of each other and can be applied for separately, although a fee reduction is available for anyone applying for all five sessions.
All sessions can be attended either in Oxford or online.
Learn more about the other individual sessions on offer as part of this series:
Upon successful completion of this session, you will be issued with an official digital badge from the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford.
After the session, you will receive an email with a link and instructions on how to download your digital badge. You will be able to add your badge to your email signature and share it on social media if you choose to do so.
| Description | Costs |
|---|---|
| Fee for this training session | £75.00 |
Successful applicants will be emailed an invoice for the training session fees.
If you register for all 5 sessions a discount of 20% is available. To obtain this discount please apply for the discounted package.
Learn more about the other individual sessions on offer as part of this series:
This session is aimed at postgraduate students who are applying for or are currently enrolled on a PhD programme.
Applicants must submit a current CV which will allow the course tutors to assess your suitability for this training session.
To apply for this session, please select the green 'apply' button at the top of this page.
Applications will close at 8am UK time on Monday 16 March 2026.
