A biweekly publication for faculty and staff

Library Announces Student Research Award Winners, Research Week Participation

April 2, 2014

Library Student Research Award Winners Announced

Congratulations to students Stacey Van and Kristen Renberg, winners of the 2014 Undergraduate Library Research competition.Van and Renberg also participated in the Research Poster Competition sponsored by theOffice of Research and earned their library awards by submitting their research bibliographies and essays about the library research process.

Van’s research poster titled “Migration of Mouse Fibroblast Through Modified Myocardial Matrix Scaffolds” described experimentation with an extracellular matrix hydrogel that promotes cardiac cell regeneration following a heart attack. She used library databases including Academic Search Complete, PubMed, BioMed Central, IEEE Xplore and SciFinder Scholar to review the literature for her research.

Renberg’s poster “Gender Cues and Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions: Experimental Study on Source Cues” focused on research analyzing the role of gender cues in relation to decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court on issues related to women’s rights. Renberg’s research strategies involved using articles published in highly revered political science journals, as well as using advanced search features available in Google Scholar.

This is the third year the UC Merced Library has offered awards in conjunction with the campuswide research poster competition. The awards honor students who demonstrate a high level of information literacy in their research. Information literacy skills include finding, selecting, evaluating, synthesizing and citing scholarly information sources. Each winner received a $100 prize. For more information about next year’s competition, please contact Susan Mikkelsen.

Some of our librarians also took part in the Assessment as Research Symposium with instruction librarians Susan Mikkelsen and Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco giving the presentation “Assessing Student Preference for Interactive vs. Video Library Tutorials,” and Sara Davidson-Squibb presenting a collaborative poster “Using Scholarly Sources: Are Students as Prepared as They Think They Are?”

The presentation by Mikkelsen and McMunn-Tetangco discussed their assessment of students’ preference for interactive (created with the guide-on-the-side) software or passive video library tutorials. The results of their study have subsequently informed the library’s best practices for creating tutorials, which are now made available in both interactive and video formats.

Davidson-Squibb’s poster illustrated whether a student’s perceived ability to locate scholarly resources is really reflected in his or her work. The findings indicated that even though students are frequently able to judge and express the quality of their work, there is also a frequent disconnect between students’ stated confidence levels and their actual abilities. This disconnect may speak to why students do not always meet the minimum requirements for the inclusion of scholarly resources in their work.

The library continues to get involved in a variety of ways during Research Week and looks forward to being a solid partner in UC Merced research activities in 2014.

RefWorks Resources

RefWorks, a citation management tool, is available for students and faculty and staff members. With RefWorks, you can organize references, create bibliographies and insert citation information directly into your papers. The UC Merced Library has several resources available to help you use RefWorks. These include brief tutorials, and a 45-minute recorded webinar.

Contact the library with any additional questions.