Graduate Student Library Orientation

The CWU librarians are here to assist you in your research by helping you find sources in OneSearch, the databases, and elsewhere. They all have advanced degrees (in some cases more than one), so they are familiar with the more stringent requirements of graduate-level study. If you are looking for research assistance, or have other questions about the library and its many resources, please please reach out to one of our libraries, we are here to help!

Research Workshops

The library regularly holds workshops on topics that may be useful to you as a graduate student. You can check our Library Events Calendar for upcoming events!

Research Guides

For more information on the research process you can check out some of our other LibGuides. You can also view out the full list of research guides here. These guides include general guides to help familiarize yourself with certain subjects, and more specific guides oriented towards specific research areas and classes, including classes at the graduate level. These are some good guides to start with:

Citation managers are a great tool to help you manage and organize your research as you work through your graduate studies. Citation managers like Zotero and Mendeley can be a great way to store different articles and your notes on them, organize your citations, and integrate your citations into a Word document. 

If you are looking for additional information on how to incorporate citation managers into your work, you can check our Library Events Calendar for upcoming citation management tools workshops, or explore the resources below. 

Zotero:

Zotero is a free, open source software developed to help manage sources and citations. By using Zotero you can:

• Organize sources into collections for projects
• Attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations
• Create bibliographies using Word or Open Office

Zotero has their own guide on how to use the tool and a number of video tutorials through their site.

Mendeley:

Mendeley is a free reference manager for helping you organize your research articles and materials. You can access Mendeley from an online digital library on any computer, and from a desktop manager. It can be used to:

• Create and manage citations of books, articles, videos, and more               
• Import citations from databases 
• Automatically extract metadata from imported PDFs
• Collaborate with other researchers online
• Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
• Highlight and annotate papers and share those notes with others
• Organize using groups, tags, and filters