Kansas State University

K-State Libraries announce schedule for fall graduate workshop series

Submitted by Cailin Riley

Join K-State Libraries for The Library and Your Research, a free workshop series co-sponsored by the Graduate Student Council that helps graduate students enhance and professionalize their scholarly pursuits.

The sessions take place from 1:30-2:30 p.m. each Monday via Zoom. Please register for each session by using the sign-up form. 

• Sept. 11: "Starting Your Literature Review in Social Sciences and Education." Are you preparing a literature review for a paper, article, thesis or dissertation? This workshop will help! Learn why a literature review is important, how to use K-State Libraries' databases to select articles, how to evaluate the articles and how to organize the review. For this session, article searching will be demonstrated using social sciences and education databases; however, the concepts will be applicable to all disciplines.

• Sept. 18: "Managing Citations and References." Citations and references, while essential to research and publishing, also consume a lot of valuable time to store, organize and format. This hands-on workshop will demonstrate the essentials of citation manager tools and will introduce several different tools before focusing on Zotero. Participants will set up an account and learn some of the common steps to organize citations and create bibliographies.

• Sept. 25: "Getting the Most Out of Google Scholar and Scopus." Research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary; your search strategies should as well. Google Scholar and Scopus are two of the largest and most popular multidisciplinary databases for discovering journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters. Attend this session to learn how to improve the quality of your search results through advanced techniques such as proximity searching, stemming, field searching and citation tracing. You will also learn how to use Scopus to discover researchers by topic and to examine the scholarly output of specific institutions.

• Oct. 2: "Starting Your Literature Review in the Sciences." Are you preparing a literature review for a paper, article, thesis or dissertation? This workshop will help! Learn why a literature review is important, how to use K-State Libraries' databases to select articles, how to evaluate the articles and how to organize the review. For this session, article searching will be demonstrated using PubMed, Web of Science and other science databases; however, the concepts will be applicable to all disciplines.

• Oct. 9: "Intro to Survey Design." Surveys are a critical element of research, in the social sciences and beyond. If you're planning survey research but you aren't sure where to start, or if you're simply looking for a new perspective on your existing research, then this workshop is for you. The goal of the workshop is to provide an understanding of what skills are required to conduct strong survey research and provide a foundation for participants to develop those skills. Together, we'll explore the basics of writing a strong survey, building a sample, recruiting participants and analyzing your results.

• Oct. 16: "Free AI Tools for Literature Reviews." Can literature reviews be fun? With AI tools such as Elicit and Research Rabbit, the answer is yes, provided that you use them appropriately and recognize their weaknesses. In this workshop, you will learn to quickly and easily augment traditional discovery methods by visualizing relationships among articles, finding articles based on similarity, and summarizing and extracting information of interest. In addition to new skills, you will emerge with knowledge of strategies for finding additional AI-powered discovery engines.

• Oct. 23: "Finding Social Sciences Data Sets." Are you looking for existing data sets for a paper, thesis or dissertation? Learn about the social sciences data sets available to you through K-State Libraries subscriptions, as well as free, high-quality data sources. This workshop will demonstrate strategies for locating social sciences data, with an emphasis on the ICPSR data archive. 

• Oct. 30: "Evidence Synthesis: An Overview for Non-Health Sciences Researchers." Evidence synthesis refers to a range of methods that researchers use to identify, analyze and synthesize the results of multiple studies. Learn about types of evidence synthesis, such as scoping reviews and systematic reviews, and the steps involved in an evidence synthesis project. Librarians who work with social sciences and sciences students and faculty will discuss what you should know before embarking on an evidence synthesis project. 

• Nov. 6: "Copyright, Your ETDR and Publishing." Writing and publishing your work can be both exciting and daunting. This workshop will provide a crash course on the fundamentals of copyright to help you create and share your work. We will explore how to reuse others' works legally and ethically, point you to tools that will help you make decisions and find material you can reuse in your ETDR or other RSCAD work. We will cover how to read and interpret publishing and copyright assignment agreements. Finally, as we explore your rights as an author, you will learn how to share your work with the world, helping you increase your impact.

• Nov. 13: "Developing Your Scholarly Identity." Looking to kick-start or strengthen your scholarly online presence? This workshop will introduce and explore the fundamentals of scholarly identity management. We will tour and delve into tools like Google Scholar and ORCiD, demonstrating how to create and fill out your unique profiles. Want to learn more about impact metrics? We'll provide a quick overview of the pros and cons of types of metrics, like citation and alt-metrics. Finally, as we explore how to curate an online scholarly identity, we will cover ways you can share or represent your work through different platforms.

• Nov. 27: "After Graduation: Accessing Research on the Job." Are you graduating soon? As you transition from K-State, your access to library resources will change. This workshop will review library privileges for alumni and introduce you to research sources available after you graduate.

Questions? Contact Laura Bonella, head of academic services.