Day in review Jan 19, 2016

I still haven’t gotten used to typing 2016 yet. I’m keep catching myself and having to correct. As predicted, the year started out running. I just had my first instruction session today.

This course is part of COM, which has been hard to get traction from. But I was remembered and included this semester. This is a grant writing course that runs grad students through the process of writing for NIH. I am listed as an instructor rather than a guest lecturer, so I took advantage of that by assigning students out of class work. We’ll be having one consultation to make sure they are on track for finding literature. I have run them through the basics of search mechanics, key databases, and analysis tools like SCOPUS.

That was the first part of the class. The second was the getting them to understand the importance of a citation manager and what they are capable of doing. This also included a bit of data management in the form of file name conventions, folder organization, and options for annotating their PDFs.

The consultation meeting will cover their chosen citation manager, their initial search attempts and how to refine them, what key authors and journals they have found on their topic. Many of the students had some sort of access to a citation manager, but they just aren’t using them.

This wasn’t my most polished lecture. I am hoping that the combination of lecture and consult will address issues the course coordinator has brought to my attention. For the long tail, I’m hoping it will also create a bond with students so that they know to come to me with search help. Although, I wonder if they don’t because they think it’s “cheating”. I’ll have to come back to that concept.