W&M Libraries and the Writing Resources Center staff are offering sessions designed to provide research skills training for summer research students. You need to attend at least two courses. You should attend one live session and one recorded session (from either this year or previous years). After each session, please complete the evaluation form. You will have fulfilled the requirement when you have submitted two evaluation forms for both a live and recorded session.
Each session will run approximately 45-60 minutes. Attendees of live sessions will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the talk. If you have questions after watching a recording, please email sweref@wm.edu and we'll help you out!
To attend a session, use the link provided under the course description. For the live sessions, after registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
When writing a research paper, it can be easy to overlook the human side of scholarship – how being cited in a study (or not) can have real, material consequences, and how social structures can systematically exclude certain people from scholarship. This workshop will explore these ideas and give you strategies for making your literature review more inclusive.
Slides, case study, and article for activity
Further reading: | Inclusive Citation: How Diverse Are Your References? | Understanding the Extent of Gender Gap in Citations | ChatGPT Prompt
Learn about in-person and digital options for presenting your undergraduate research. You’ll discover the key features of each option and learn techniques to create a presentation that audiences will enjoy and remember.
What are the important components to include on your research poster? What design principles should you keep in mind to make sure your content is accessible and interesting to your audience? These questions and many more will be addressed in our session on creating a trifold board research poster for the Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium.
ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-powered tools like Scite.ai and Research Rabbit have become increasingly prominent lately but how good are they for research? What are their pros and cons? Which tools are good for what (and what aren’t they good for) and why? Join us for a discussion of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools for research and the pros and cons of them.
Peer review is at the very foundation of academic research, yet we rarely have opportunities to discuss, examine, and assess the nuanced aspects and implications of this process. How did it develop? How does it affect our writing and research habits? Does the twentieth-century peer review model still work in the twenty-first century? This workshop is an open and critical discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the modern peer review process, with practical consideration of how it shapes our research and writing processes.
Finding and evaluating research is just one step in the research process; managing it effectively and productively is another. How do you organize your research, take notes, annotate articles, manage data, and produce your research projects? What’s in your research toolkit and what is your workflow? What tools and processes do you find useful? Join us for some tips on useful tools and techniques for note taking, managing your research, and more, and discuss your own tips and tools!
Many libraries, museums, and other institutions have physical and digitized primary sources in their collections. This workshop will discuss how to locate such repositories and use their collections purposefully and critically. Particular attention will be paid to primary sources available through W&M Libraries' Special Collections Research Center.
How do you tell the story of your research in five minutes with five slides? Join our session on creating a digital presentation for the Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium to learn how to develop a short, dynamic presentation that engages an interdisciplinary audience.
How do you organize the sources you find as you research? Random emails to yourself? Hand-written notes of titles you can never find again? What if we told you there was an easier way to both keep your sources found AND cite those sources later? This workshop will introduce you to Zotero from installation to creating citations in your Word documents.
Watch the recording
If you've used Zotero in the past or if you've attended the Beginner Zotero session this summer, you are now ready for Advanced Zotero! This session will introduce you to group libraries, adding new citation styles to Zotero, and other features you can utilize to improve your usage of this citation manager.
Watch the recording.
When applying for grad school or a job, or for promotion or tenure, researchers and scholars must communicate how their work makes an impact on the field. We will discuss common metrics used to identify top journals and article impact, and the controversies related to these measurements.
Watch the recording.
Many libraries, museums, and other institutions have physical and digitized primary sources in their collections. This workshop will discuss how to locate such repositories and use their collections purposefully and critically. Particular attention will be paid to primary sources available through W&M Libraries' Special Collections Research Center.
Watch the recording.
Learn about in-person and digital options for presenting your undergraduate research. You’ll discover the key features of each option and learn techniques to create a presentation that audiences will enjoy and remember.
Watch the recording.
Using open data offers a wide range of datasets including health, scientific, economic, political and social topics from governments, researchers, and other institutions. In this workshop you’ll learn what open data is, who produces it, how to locate open datasets, and evaluate date with consideration for ethics and limitations.
What the recording.
Have you ever found the perfect article only to find it's 30 years old? You'd like something newer, but you can't seem to find it through your tried and true search methods? A citation trail is the solution! In this session, we will learn how to follow the citation trail forward and backward, as well as how to read a citation to determine what it is you're looking for.
Watch the recording.
When writing a research paper, it can be easy to overlook the human side of scholarship – how being cited in a study (or not) can have real, material consequences, and how social structures can systematically exclude certain people from scholarship. This workshop will explore these ideas and give you strategies for making your literature review more inclusive.
Watch the recording.
Slides and article for activity
Further reading: Case Study | Inclusive Citation: How Diverse Are Your References? | Understanding the Extent of Gender Gap in Citations
Do you ever struggle with the best way to organize an essay? Or worry that the final paper just won't make sense? In this Writing Resources Center webinar, you will learn how to structure an essay in a way that attends to the reader's logic. After taking a close look at typical essay structures, you'll learn how to create an "essay map," and you'll explore strategies for guiding your reader through your work. Expect an interactive session designed to help you write with your reader in mind.
Watch the recording
Have you been wishing for a refresher course on writing fundamentals? Look no further! In this Writing Resources Center webinar, you will take close look at that most essential unit of academic thought: the paragraph. Together, we will consider how the paragraph functions as a form of punctuation, compare well-developed and poorly-developed examples, and discover several types of paragraphs that can add clarity and focus to your work. Join us for an interactive session designed to improve your focus and better engage your audience.
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You've drafted your essay, and it's time to hand it in, right? Not so fast! Revising is an essential part of the writing process. In this Writing Resources Center webinar, you'll learn strategies to focus your revision on elements that will make the biggest difference in the quality of your paper. You'll also learn how to identify and correct common sentence-level errors. Join us for an interactive session that will provide tools to help you see your own work with fresh eyes.
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Planning to present your research results? Join the Writing Resources Center for an interactive webinar to help you learn how to create a presentation that audiences will enjoy and remember. You'll discover the key features of a good presentation -- and you'll learn what pitfalls to avoid. We'll also consider strategies to manage performance anxiety.
Watch the recording
Have you ever wondered why the five-paragraph essay was taught in high school if that's not what you're supposed to do in college? In this Writing Resources Center webinar, you will build on your early training in essay writing by learning strategies for developing an organically-structured paper that contains an ambitious and debatable thesis, a compelling argument, and valid evidence for all key points. Expect an interactive session designed to energize your writing.
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A literature review in the sciences presents a critical synthesis of the research on a particular topic. In this webinar, you will learn how to develop your literature review into a focused discussion and interpretation of your source material. We'll consider several organizational strategies, and discuss common conventions of scientific writing.
Watch the recording
In addition, here is a link to a PDF of the slides. It contains useful links, so students may like to have access to it.
In this workshop, the University Libraries Oral Historian, Andre Taylor, you will cover the essential steps of conducting an oral history, including how to develop an oral history project, the legal issues you must consider in this work, learning about your subject prior to the interview, methods for recording, and what to do with your oral histories after the project.
Watch the recording
HANDOUT: Conducting an Oral History