Quick Skills for Research
This page compiles short, online videos to help students begin the research process. If you are an instructor looking for more teaching resources, see our collection of Lesson Plans, Activities, & Handouts.
- Refining Your Research Topic
- Picking Keywords
- CatSearch: MSU Library Search
- Understanding Peer Review
Audio and video transcripts are available in the notes section of the tutorials. Thesevideos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Add Videos to Canvas: Want to include these videos in your course shell? See our guide for Adding Library Resources in Canvas.
How to turn your ideas into a research topic you can explore.
How to identify the main concepts of your research and turn them into searchable keywords.
Learn how to find articles, books, and more using the MSU Library search interface: CatSearch.
Overview of the peer review process for scholarly research.
Lesson Plans, Activities, and Handouts
In addition to the tutorials listed on this page, the library has lesson plans, activities, and handouts available to help scaffold and teach research assignments. Resources are available for teaching various steps in the research process:
Additional Research Tutorials
MSU Library also subscribes to Credo Information Literacy - CORE multimedia content. The videos, interactive tutorials, and quizzes use innovative technology and proven pedagogy to build essential research, information literacy and critical-thinking skills that will help students thrive in their academic careers and beyond.
Tutorial Sections Include (use link above to access the content)
| Information Literacy Pre-Assessment | Evaluating Information |
| Information Literacy: Why is it Important? | Understanding Misinformation |
| Developing a Research Focus | Synthesizing Information for Academic Writing |
| Selecting Appropriate Digital Sources | Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Summarizing |
| Choosing & Using Keywords | Annotated Bibliography |
| Search Techniques, Part 1 | Why Citations Matter |
| Search Techniques, Part 2 | Presentation Skills |
| Evaluating Digital Sources | Digital Privacy |
| How To Read Scholarly Materials | Post-Test |
Ifyou would like to embed one or more module into Canvas, contact one of our instruction librarians or email us at ask@montana.libanswers.com