Graduate Student Research Toolbox
Learn about the library resources and services that are critical for success in graduate research. Topics include citation management tools, locating dissertations and theses, and other research support resources.
Data Management Tools and Services
Research Data Management Basics
Good data management practices can help ensure that your research data are findable, accessible, and re-usable long-term. In this session, learn useful tips to help you manage your data.
NIH Data Management and Sharing Updates
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently enacted big changes to Data Management and Sharing Plan requirements. Join Stacy Winchester, Research Data Librarian at USC, to learn how to navigate these updates.
NSF Data Management and Sharing Updates
Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) made big changes to its requirements for Data Management and Sharing Plans. NSF DMS Plans are no longer narratives submitted as PDF, but are now web-based forms with new requirements.
Understanding Data Repositories: How to Find and Use Them
Research data repositories are important resources for discovering, accessing, sharing, and preserving data across disciplines. Funding agencies and publishers increasingly require the use of repositories for data sharing and preservation.
Data Management Plans and DMPTool
Is a Data Management Plan required to obtain funding for your research? Would you like to plan for the management of your research data to make life easier down the road? Learn about Data Management Plans and DMPTool, an online wizard for creating DMPs that meet specific funder requirements.
Cleaning Messy Data with OpenRefine
Before it can be analyzed or visualized, inconsistencies and errors in data need to be fixed. If you'd like to learn how to prepare your data for analysis, please register for this session. OpenRefine is a free tool for cleaning and transforming messy tabular data. In this workshop, participants will learn about OpenRefine and get hands-on experience with basic data cleaning.
Artificial Intelligence and Text and Data Analysis
GenAI Essentials - Building Your GenAI Research Toolkit
ChatGPT started it all less than four years ago. Since then, a lot has changed and evolved. Using the research lifecycle as a functional guide, this workshop considers essential ways GenAI tools and techniques can assist with research pursuits.
GenAI Tools - Introduction to Google NotebookLM
Google's NotebookLM is a GenAI-powered research assistant using Google's Gemini learning language model. During this learning session, participants explore some of the ways NotebookLM is distinct from other GenAI tools and how it can support research work.
GenAI Use – Using GenAI as your Writing Coach, not your Ghostwriter
GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and others CAN be highly useful in the academic writing process. One MUST, however, recognize how to use them appropriately. In this learning session, we will explore how to use GenAI tools in an effective AND RESPONSIBLE manner in the academic writing process. We will consider ways of using these tools as part of the brainstorming, revision, and editing components of the writing process. Finally, we will provide an understanding of some of the limitations of these tools in the writing process.
AI-Assisted Coding for Research: Introduction to Codex
Codex is an AI research programming assistant embedded within OpenAI's ChatGPT. This interactive one-hour workshop introduces researchers to the fundamentals of Codex and AI-assisted coding workflows.
Hands-on Workshop on Text Analysis for Beginners
Do you have textual data for qualitative analysis? This session is for anyone looking to transform unstructured text data into meaningful insights, with topics including an introduction to text analysis.
Hands-on Workshop on Extracting Data from Websites Using APIs
Unlock the power of APIs to efficiently extract and utilize data from websites. This hands-on workshop is designed for beginners and intermediate learners who want to gain practical skills in API-based data extraction.
The Databases You Know, with the AI Tools You Might Not
Many databases have added in new AI tools to assist researchers. While some are easy to find and fairly intuitive, others are more opaque. In this workshop, we help you understand what the AI tools are drawing on and doing, and how you can use them to your best advantage.
Machine Learning Fundamentals in Practice
In this hands-on workshop, participants will apply the concepts introduced in "AI and Machine Learning - Beyond the Basics", through guided, hands-on exercises using a Python Jupyter Notebook. Participants will explore two fundamental supervised learning tasks -classification and regression using real datasets, train models, evaluate their performance, and interpret the results.
A Beginner's Guide to AI and Machine Learning
This beginner-friendly workshop introduces the core concepts of AI and Machine Learning through interactive examples and hands-on activities—without requiring any coding experience.
Scholarly and Digital Publishing
Introduction to Publishing in Scholarly Journals
In this session, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of the academic publishing process. While reviewing the publishing cycle, you will learn to prepare your manuscript and select a high impact, appropriate journal for publication.
Being a Successful Author of an Academic Monograph
sdThis workshop, led by Michael J. McGandy, USC Press, will provide an overview of best practices for graduate students who will be conceptualizing, pitching, contracting, and then publishing a first academic monograph.
Introduction to Peer Review for Authors of Academic Monographs
Peer review is at the heart of academic publishing. It is also a high-stakes process for early-career scholars, who can benefit from an inside perspective on the goals, standards, sequence of events, and expectations involved. This workshop is led by Michael J. McGandy of the USC Press.
Understanding Copyright and Publication Agreements: Safeguard your Research
In the publishing world, transferring copyright is often a necessary step. Recent partnerships between scholarly publishers and technology companies emphasize the importance of understanding publication agreements and safeguarding research.
Staying Scholarly: Navigating Predatory Publishing, Citation Manipulation, and Research Fraud
It is essential to know how to identify and avoid bad research and publishing practices. This virtual workshop equips attendees with tools to recognize and steer clear of predatory publishers, citation manipulation, and research fraud.
Introduction to ORCiD
An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a unique digital identifier associated with a researcher to aid in research output discovery, eliminate name ambiguity, and encourage proper citations.
Embracing Public Scholarship: Connecting Your Research and the Public
Discover how to bridge the gap between academic research and public engagement. Your work has the potential to make a meaningful impact beyond traditional academia.
Explore Creating a Website for Your Research
It’s a great idea to create a website to tell people about your research, but where to start? In this workshop, options for web hosting and best practices for getting started are discussed.
Measuring What Matters: An Introduction to Research Impact
In this introductory workshop, you will explore how to locate and responsibly interpret key research impact indicators.
What’s Your Scholarly Presence?
Discover ways to build a scholarly online identity that accurately represents your research and expertise. In this workshop, you will learn pre-publication strategies to increase your research visibility, how to create and optimize researcher profiles, and use academic social networks.
WordPress for Your Research
This will be a short introduction to getting started with WordPress, using the Libraries' hosting service CreateDigital.
Storymaps and Storytelling with ESRI
ESRI GIS software comes with a simple storytelling tool called Storymaps. Let me show you how easy it is to create a scrolling story using simple maps.
Data Visualization
Data Visualization Essentials - Foundational Choices
What makes charts, graphs, plots, maps, and other data visualizations effective or ineffective? How do I decide what type of chart, graph, or other visualization to use to accomplish my purpose?
Data Visualization Mechanics - Creating Data Visualizations using Microsoft Excel 365
Most people may be familiar with Microsoft Excel as a spreadsheet software program, but Excel also has a variety of capabilities for creating charts, graphs, plots, and other data visualizations.
Data Visualization Mechanics - Creating Data Visualizations using Microsoft Power BI
One of the most commonly used data visualization creation products, particularly in the business world, is Microsoft Power BI. This session covers the basic steps and procedures for creating data visualizations using Power BI.
Data Visualization Mechanics - Creating Data Visualizations using Tableau (Tableau Public)
Tableau is one of the primary products used to create data visualizations. The University's Data Dashboards are constructed using Tableau, whose focused purpose and relative ease of use make it a common data visualization tool.
Research Computing
University Libraries offers several sessions each semester in collaboration with, and led by, Research Computing staff.
AI and Machine Learning – Beyond the Basics
"AI and Machine Learning - Beyond the Basics" is an intermediate workshop for students and researchers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the theory and practice of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The workshop will focus on the concepts and underlying algorithms of AI and ML, typical applications such as computer vision and object classification, commonly used software packages, and the use of hardware accelerators.
This workshop is intended as an intermediate-level workshop for attendees who are already somewhat familiar with AI and Machine learning, and who are ready to investigate the topic more deeply.
Introduction to Git and GitHub
Git is a free version control system that programmers and developers use to track and share code. GitHub is a free website that simplifies the findability, accessibility, and reusability of program code, in addition to providing a web browser interface to the version control commands. This workshop will take you from being a novice to being highly proficient at using Git and GitHub. You will learn how to collaborate on projects effectively with GitHub, build a solid foundation in Git, and master advanced version control skills.
Introduction to Python using Anaconda
This workshop will introduce users to the Python programming language. Python is an easy-to-learn, extensible, high-level programming language which has the simplicity and readability of its code as its core design principles. As a result, Python is one of the most widely used programming languages for scientific data processing and many other applications. Python libraries and applications are available for a wide range of applications, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.
Introduction to MATLAB
MATLAB is a feature-rich programming language for scientific and numerical data processing for which USC has a university-wide site license. MATLAB also has many application toolkits available for use in diverse fields of research. This workshop will introduce users to the MATLAB programming language, with a focus on reading spreadsheet data into MATLAB, processing the data using matrix operations, writing the processed data to a spreadsheet, and visualizing the data. A MATLAB license and an installed version of MATLAB are recommended but not required to attend this workshop.
Introduction to R and RStudio
This workshop will introduce users to the R programming language using RStudio. R is an easy-to-learn programming language often used for scientific and statistical data processing. RStudio is an integrated development environment for and graphical user interface to the R language which greatly simplifies programming in R. Together they combine to provide a free and convenient programming platform for data analysis and visualization.
Introduction to High Performance Computing and SLURM
This workshop will introduce users to accessing and efficiently using Theia and Hyperion, USC’s High Performance Computing cluster resources, and to the SLURM parallel job execution system. The workshop will also cover the basics of transferring data and programs to and from Theia and Hyperion.
Introduction to Linux Command Line
This workshop will introduce users who are new to Linux or have only basic familiarity to some commands which are extremely helpful for the successful use of the Theia and Hyperion high performance computing clusters and Linux systems in general. The focus of the commands covered is primarily on data manipulation and data searching. Scripting, which can be used for automating tasks, will be briefly covered.
Working with HPC: Research Data Storage, Globus, and Open OnDemand
This workshop will demonstrate key resources and programs which facilitate doing research using USC's High Performance Computing clusters, Theia and Hyperion. First, we will demonstrate USC's Research Data Storage resource, the DataHub, which can be used for storing and sharing active research data to PCs and Macs within the USC campus or remotely via the virtual private network for USC affiliates. Next, we will present Globus, a high-speed data transfer program which allows you to transfer data between your computer, data collection devices, the DataHub, Theia and Hyperion, and to other institutions and national centers via Internet2. Globus can also be used to share data with external research collaborators. Lastly, we will demonstrate using Open OnDemand to run virtual Linux desktops and Jupyter Notebooks on HPC systems from your laptop or desktop computer using a Chrome or Edge Browser Window, allowing you to take advantage of the many CPU cores, large memory, huge storage, fast networking, and state-of-the-art GPUs available on these systems using familiar graphical interfaces.