Librarians are available to teach towards a variety of advanced research and open scholarship topics and learning outcomes. We can deliver synchronous and asynchronous instruction designed to meet your student’s needs. Below are some example learning outcomes we can help you meet. We can adapt or extend these outcomes to best align with your curricular and subject goals.  In addition to library instruction for your course, these objectives could also be adapted for a workshop for a class, department, or group of students.

Each learning objective is meant to represent 15-20 minutes of class time.  For a 50 minute instruction session, we recommend selecting no more than 2-3 learning objectives.

For asynchronous instruction, see our collection of online tutorials and videos; select and embed one or more to fit the needs of your students. Customized online modules for your courses are also available upon request and with appropriate lead time.

Search Strategies (i.e. Keywords, Boolean)

• Students will be able to:
  • Effectively navigate academic databases and search engines
  • Refine search results with advanced techniques
  • Learn to effectively mine citations with backward and forward citation searching

Literature Review How-To

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the significance of thorough literature searches
  • Learn how to formulate effective and targeted search queries 

Source Evaluation

• Students will be able to:
  • Distinguish sources relevant to their topic and appropriate for their purposes

Keeping Up-to-Date With Literature in Your Field

• Students will be able to:
  • Identify key sources in their field including top journals and relevant professional organizations
  • Create automated alerts customized to their interests

International Resources Such as Newspapers

• Students will be able to:
  • Access foreign language materials through the CSU Libraries’ website

Data Management

• Students will be able to:
  • Describe how a data management plan is related to a research project, and why it is created
  • List parts of a data management plan and what those parts generally contain
  • Understand and apply the principles of good file naming and organization practices
  • Explain the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary file formats
  • Create documentation for research data, such as a README file or codebook
  • Recognize the various data management tools, resources, and techniques available

Finding Data Sets Including Geospatial and Economic Data

• Students will be able to:
  • Use re3data.org to identify the most prevalent repositories for a specific discipline
  • Evaluate the appropriateness of a data set for a particular research question
  • Evaluate the quality and completeness of metadata associated with a published data set
  • Identify legal and ethical restrictions on the reuse of data

Finding Archival or Special Collections Materials

• Students will be able to:
  • Locate archival materials, including digital collections
  • Construct and implement search strategies for and understand how to access archival and special collections materials
  • Understand how to incorporate archival materials as evidence in their research
  • Recognize the role archives and special collections play in documenting the cultural and academic output of CSU

Geospatial Thinking and GIS Mapping

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the importance of a spatial perspective in research, and see how these data can be mapped to identify patterns
  • Discover options for creating dynamic mapping products for visualizing data or telling stories including learning the fundamentals of creating an ArcGIS StoryMap
  • Incorporate and align historical printed maps and their attribute information into modern technologies to explore change over time
  • Recognize the benefits of finding, using, and sharing open data and code, and utilizing freely available tools, to develop reproducible research workflows for research

Evidence Synthesis / Systematic Review

• Students will be able to:
  • Describe the steps, resources, and discipline appropriate guidelines for conducting a systematic review
  • Conduct an exploratory literature search for refining a research question, scoping the project, and locating seed articles
  • Identify the purpose and components of a systematic review protocol
  • Draft a sensitive search strategy for a core database that includes controlled vocabulary and keywords with appropriate field tags
  • Critically read and appraise published systematic reviews for quality, methods, and risk of bias

Copyright

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the basics of copyright and its purpose in protecting original works of authorship
  • Differentiate between legal and illegal uses of copyrighted materials
  • Understand the concept of fair use and how to apply the four factors to determine whether the use of copyrighted material is fair or infringing
  • Understand the conditions under which works enter the public domain
  • Understand Creative Commons licenses and their role in granting permissions for the use of creative works
  • Understand proper use of others’ copyrighted materials and one’s own published work in Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Open Access

• Students will be able to:
  • Recognize the benefits of open access and its impact in making scholarly research and resources freely available to the global community
  • Effectively navigate open access platforms to locate open access journals, articles, and textbooks, ensuring continued access to research materials beyond college years
  • Evaluate the credibility of open access resources, ensuring the use of reliable information for academic work
  • Aware of opportunities to engage in open access publishing, including the gold and green open access routes, promoting dissemination of research to a wider audience

Reproducible Research / Open Science

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the definition of reproducibility and the differences between computational reproducibility and replicability
  • Discuss the importance of reproducibility for the scientific process
  • Understand the benefits of making research data and other scholarly products such as code and protocols openly available
  • Discuss the ethical considerations of sharing data, such as protecting participant privacy and respecting Indigenous data governance
  • Remember the FAIR principles for data sharing (making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable)
  • Identify at least one tool or practice to make their own work more reproducible

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism / Attribution

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the importance of and reasons for proper attribution
  • Recognize best practices for incorporating others’ work into their research including how to properly cite materials

Citation Management

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the benefits of citation management and the impact on their research
  • Create their own citation management strategy utilizing appropriate tools
  • Recognize the various citation management tools, features, and techniques available

File Management

• Students will be able to:
  • Implement best practices for file naming and organization
  • Implement an appropriate backup strategy for their files and data
  • Recognize the importance of versioning and archiving

Researcher Reputation (eg. ORCID)

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand the role researcher reputation plays in career development
  • Curate their researcher profile in databases such as Web of Science or by utilizing tools such as ORCID

Research Impact

• Students will be able to:
  • Understand how research impact is determined and what that means
  • Find the Journal Impact Factor for a given journal and identify journals with high Impact Factors in a given field