Designed by the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE) and University Libraries, the Research Ready Series equips graduate students and other members of the BGSU teaching community with the tools and strategies needed to confidently navigate the research and publishing process.

Research can be daunting, especially when working on a long-term project like a thesis or dissertation. University Libraries is here to help! The Research Ready Series provides strategies, tools, and tricks of the trade that will save you time and ease the stress of your research project. Attend all three sessions in this series to be eligible to receive the email signature stamp.

To learn more about upcoming sessions in this series, please see the listings below. Listings are in chronological order by date.

Advance registration is required for all events. Registration will close one business day before the scheduled event. Please register for an event by clicking on the registration link below. Please indicate your interest in receiving the stamp on the registration form. Registration is open to all members of the BGSU teaching community, including faculty, instructors, graduate students, and staff.

To individuals with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in the workshop either on the registration form or by contacting Accessibility Services at access@bgsu.edu or 419-372-8495. Please notify Accessibility Services and/or the CFE office prior to the event. 

Facilitator: Laura Sheets, Associate Professor, Library Teaching & Learning

Strategies for researching a literature review for a thesis, dissertation, or article for publication are different from general research strategies. How do you know if you have enough sources to sound credible? Have you exhausted all your information paths? In this session, we will discuss how to get started, time-saving strategies for searching, and the appropriate information resources to trace known citations. 

By participating in this session, you will be able to:

• Draft a search statement to use in library databases and search engines.
• Define backward and forward citation chaining. 
• Identify the relevant databases and search engines for citation chaining.
• Demonstrate backward and forward citation chaining in Library Search, Web of Science, and Google Scholar.

Facilitator: Rebecca Stanwick, Assistant Teaching Professor, Library Teaching & Learning

Writing a literature review for an article, thesis, or dissertation can be daunting, especially if you’ve never written one before. Where do you even start? What should you include? In this session, we’ll discuss how to determine an appropriate scope for your literature review, how to organize your sources to make writing a breeze, and how to identify themes in your sources.  

By participating in this session, you will be able to:

• Categorize sources by theme to organize your literature review. 
• Determine an appropriate source for your literature review. 
• Identify the scope of your literature review. 

Facilitator: Laura Sheets, Associate Professor, Library Teaching & Learning

One of the easiest ways to stress less about properly citing your sources is to get organized by using citation management software. Through the University Libraries, you have a free subscription to EndNote Fusion (formerly RefWorks), one of the main citation management software programs. EndNote Fusion organizes information sources for multiple research projects and creates bibliographies, in-text citations, footnotes and endnotes in several citation styles. By using EndNote Fusion, you will save yourself a lot of time and frustration.

By participating in this session, you will be able to:

• Import information sources from library databases and the internet to EndNote Fusion.
• Create and edit projects and folders in EndNote Fusion.  
• Create a bibliography using EndNote Fusion.