Kansas State University

K-State Libraries' fall graduate workshop series schedule

Submitted by Cailin Wycoff

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. 9: "Starting Your Literature Review in Social Sciences and Education." Are you preparing a literature review for a paper, article, thesis or dissertation? 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. 16: "Managing Citations and References using Zotero." 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 focus on Zotero, a free tool that works on machines running Windows, MacOS, iOS or Linux. Participants will set up a free account and learn many skills such as adding and organizing documents, creating in-text citations and references-cited lists, and highlighting and annotating PDFs.

• Sept. 23: "Starting Your Literature Review in the Sciences." Are you preparing a literature review for a paper, article, thesis or dissertation? 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 Scopus and other science databases; however, the concepts will be applicable to all disciplines.

• Sept. 30: "Using the Electronic Theses, Dissertations and Reports Template and Support Resources Effectively." K-State provides templates to help you conform to the formatting and submission requirements of the ETDR process. The templates are designed to make things easier for your final submission. In this session, our guest presenter from IT will provide an orientation to the templates, review key tips and skills, and discuss how to use the template and resources to create and complete your submission documents for the K-State Research Exchange, or K-REx, and the ETDR process. Note: the ETDR template is supported by the Graduate School and the IT help desk, not the Libraries.

• Oct. 7: "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. 14: "AI Tools for Literature Reviews." Fun? Can literature reviews be fun? With AI tools such as Scite, SciSpace, Perplexity, Scholarcy and Research Rabbit, the answer is yes — provided that you use them appropriately. 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. 

• Oct. 21: "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. 28: "Evidence Synthesis: An Overview for Non-Health Sciences Researchers." Evidence synthesis refers to a range of methods 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. 4: "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. 11: "Developing Your Scholarly Identity." Looking to kickstart 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. 18: "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 in your next chapter.