Information Literacy for Your PhD: Successfully Search, Use and Manage Scientific publications' (504)

7 October 2026

Thomas Henkel ; Raphaël Grolimund

This seminar helps participants successfully search, manage and reuse the scientific information with which to begin their doctorate, or to update the publication list before they begin to write up their thesis.

General and specific search tools are addressed to enable the participants to better define the topic of their PhD thesis (has it already been covered?), to get to know their subject in depth (what is the state of the art in a particular field of research?), and to begin monitoring relevant scientific material (what are the latest publications on a topic?). The workshop introduces a reference management tool which permits the structured organization of the participant's documents and the easy citation of their sources.

Finally participants are made aware of good citation practices in the context of Swiss copyright law.

Learning outcomes

At the end of the seminar participants will be able to:

• find scientific publications effectively and efficiently
• use a reference management tool
• adapt their reuse of the sources of scientific information (texts, images, pictures, data) according to the different dissemination contexts of a document.

Pedagogical methods and logistics

Phases of theory alternate with the practical use of the tools and concepts presented, in groups or individually. Participants need a laptop with the VPN client installed.

ONLINE!

Date: Wednesday 7th October 2026

Schedule: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Location: Online

Trainers:

Thomas Henkel holds a "Licence en lettres" and is responsible for information literacy instruction at University of Fribourg. He is a founding member and president of the Swiss universities' "Information Literacy" working group.

Raphaël Grolimund is a scientific librarian at CHUV, where he trains students in information retrieval and collaborates with researchers on systematic review projects. Before joining CHUV, he trained students, doctoral candidates, and researchers at EPFL and the Geneva School of Business Administration in information literacy skills, particularly information searching, reference management using Zotero and EndNote, and the rules governing the reuse of publications and data in the context of scientific publishing.

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