Research Camp for Research Assistants, Teaching Assistants, and Grad Students

Comprehensively and critically reviewing the literature allows authors to not only situate their own work but to persuade readers that the work is necessary and worthwhile. This module will focus on structuring the literature review using writing strategies to summarize and synthesize the literature while maintaining or establishing your own voice.  

This session was offered synchronously on Tuesday, May 16. 

Writing grants can be a high-stakes and challenging activity. Focusing on Tri-Council grants, this module will tackle the difficult balance of writing a document that fits the expected form and provides the correct information, while setting the author(s) apart from other applicants.  

This session was offered synchronously on Thursday, May 18.  

Academic integrity is, inherently, about being honest in the way you approach and complete your scholarly work. One key component of realizing this goal is by accurately acknowledging the work and contributions of others (your sources) in your writing. This module will illustrate how appropriately acknowledging, analyzing, and building on the work of others credits their contribution while also making room for your own.     

This session was offered synchronously on Tuesday, May 23. 

Whether you are writing a lengthy paper, working on a graduate thesis or dissertation, or preparing a manuscript, it can sometimes be difficult to undertake a big writing project. This workshop will provide goal setting and time management techniques to help you stay on track. 

This session was offered synchronously on Wednesday, May 24. 

Multilingual graduate students have unique educational, linguistic, and cultural writing needs that go beyond the surface level of understanding and mastering vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. This module will explore key elements of academic writing within the Canadian university context to encourage more complex understandings of expectations around English writing in graduate school.

This session was offered synchronously on Tuesday, May 30.  

Citation management software lets you store and organize your references, connect to full-text articles, and format your papers. This session will introduce you to Zotero, a popular citation management program that is freely available. It will also compare Zotero to EndNote and Mendeley, other major products.  

Please download and install Zotero in advance for practice during the session.  

This session was offered synchronously on Monday, May 29. 

Copyright considerations are relevant to many university activities in Canada, both for creators and users of copyright-protected material. This module looks at your rights and responsibilities as a user of third-party materials for educational purposes. 

Topics in this module include: introduction to key copyright concepts, Fair Dealing and other exceptions, licensing, copyright support @ Dal. 

After completing this module, participants will be able to: 

• Describe how copyright relates to the work of an academic institution. 
• Evaluate your use of copyrighted material according to the Six Factors of Fair Dealing 
• Compare the user responsibilities between licensed works vs. non-licensed works 
• Find additional copyright help at Dalhousie. 

Are you looking for content beyond what can be found in traditional books and journal articles? Are you wondering if a source is appropriate to cite? In this module, we will discuss what is considered “grey” literature, why it is valuable, and explore some tools and techniques to approach this type of research. And because this type of evidence may not have quality checks, like peer review, prior to distribution, we provide some tips for critically examining the results of your searches. 

Whether you need conference proceedings or government reports, we will check out a variety of sources for grey literature beyond standard databases and catalogues. This module will draw on examples from the disciplines of health and law, but the demonstrations are applicable for interdisciplinary searching across other science and social science disciplines.    

Dal has some great resources to help you find those numbers, statistics, and datasets you need for your projects! This module provides a gentle introduction to finding Canadian statistics available through a wide variety of sources. Will include quick overviews of StatCan data tables and microdata, the Canadian Census, GeoSearch and more.  

This session was offered synchronously on Friday, June 2.

Learn to beautifully format and print tables of data. Discover some common fixes that can be applied to messy external data. Practice cleaning and analyzing data using Excel's built in tools. This module covers formatting, filtering, and conditional formatting.  

This session was offered synchronously on Wednesday, May 31. 

A whirlwind introduction to visualizing data with pivot tables and pivot charts. This module covers how to create pivot charts, and also goes over some nifty features such as slicers, timelines, and how to magically group your time fields to sort data by hour/day/etc.  

This session was offered synchronously on Monday, June 5.  

A wonderful selection of advanced formulas and Excel functions to use when working with data! Learn about string functions, removing duplicates, using criteria in formulas, Vlookup, and locating special cells (blanks, formulas, etc.) in a worksheet. By the time you’re done with this module, you might even find yourself creating simple Excel macros!  

This session was offered synchronously on Wednesday, June 7. 

Applying for ethics approval through the Health Sciences Research Ethics Board (REB) at Dalhousie can be a daunting and unfamiliar task. However, it is also a valuable tool in your research process. This session was originally recorded for the Medical Education Research Roundtables series. It provides information on:

• The role of the Research Ethics Board (REB) at Dalhousie; 
• Tips and strategies for preparing a strong ethics application for the Medical; and 
• Frequently asked questions. 

These skills are also transferable for ethics processes at other organizations such as the IWK or Nova Scotia Health Authority. 

Are you deciding whether you should complete a systematic review or a scoping review? Maybe another research synthesis method is a better fit for your question and purpose? This introductory overview of evidence synthesis methods will highlight how to decide which approach is appropriate to a specific purpose.   

Example reviews from multiple fields of research will illustrate various high-quality methodologies and we will also examine some publications that highlight what to avoid when conducting and reporting your own research synthesis. Participants will be directed to sources of reliable methodological guidance and other training resources to continue their learning.  

The systematic and comprehensive approaches of retrieving and identifying relevant evidence for research syntheses require advanced searching skills and thorough documentation. This advanced-level module dives into the processes and considerations necessary for the types of searches used in systematic and scoping reviews.  

Through demonstration with an example search and provision of instructional resources to help you apply the practices to your own topic, this module will guide you through breaking down your research question into search concepts, selection of sources to search, identification of search terms, and application of the search in multiple databases. Furthermore, we will cover best practices in documenting your searching and results, with a focus on using the PRISMA-S checklist to ensure transparency of your search methods. 

Research Impact, author rights, open access, preprints, predatory publishers, funder policies, peer review – publishing in academic journals is a key way of communicating research. However, navigating the options and variables it involves can be overwhelming. This module will provide an introduction to scholarly publishing literacy to make sure that you make informed decisions about when, where, and how you share your research for the most benefit to your field and your career. 

Copyright considerations are relevant to many university activities in Canada, both for creators and users of copyright-protected material. This module looks at your rights and responsibilities as a creator of new, original material (i.e, a copyright owner).  

Topics in this module include introduction to key copyright concepts for creators, publishing agreements, open licensing, and copyright support @ Dal. 

After completing this module, participants will be able to: 

• Explain how copyright ownership is determined 
• Analyse publishing agreements for key copyright ownership considerations 
• Assess whether open licensing is appropriate for your works 
• Find additional copyright help at Dalhousie.