ePress to Increase Research and Scholarship at CSU

There are many amenities and services within the Columbus State Libraries that help not only CSU students and faculty members but scholars everywhere. The CSU ePress, an Open Access digital archive, is an online service that preserves and collects various materials such as dissertations and theses, conference presentations, journal articles, student publications and poems.

Many scholars and students are presumed to use the CSU ePress because all works uploaded in the digital archive are accessible through Google Scholar and Google. Yet, one of the most significant and snubbed feature of the ePress is that all information provided is largely free.

This feature, and benefit, allows students to better conduct their research without the worry and burden of coming out of pocket. With the Open Access feature, scholars and students do not have to worry about certain copyright and licensing restrictions, as many scholars may have dealt with in the past.

The CSU ePress also offers search filter options and citations to better position patrons and scholars routing and conducting their research online. Many patrons of the Schwob Memorial Library are more than likely to conduct their research physically in a library; however, with the CSU ePress, finding a professor’s graduate dissertation or last winter’s issues of The Arden can be conducted from a home kitchen or in a dorm room.

The arrangement of resources available and benefit of the CSU ePress is far too accommodating for scholars and CSU students to not use. With the expansion of the CSU ePress, more and more works from faculty and staff members and students are becoming accessible; the CSU ePress helps students and scholars to conduct their research with ease, consistently.

The growing archive includes many student creative works and professional works from CSU faculty and staff that have and are presumed to improve visibility of scholarship and the rate of citations. Be sure to visit the CSU ePress and the CSU Libraries.

Research Tip: Citation Chasing

When writing a research paper it can be tricky to find enough sources.  You may find one or two that look really good, but are scrambling to find more to meet the required number.  One of the best tricks for getting sources is the tried and true technique of Citation Chasing.  

Most journal articles will have a literature review or section discussing past research on the topic by other scholars.  This is one of the best places to go to get more sources.  If you’ve found some good sources that are current and on topic, let the author do the work for you and chase down some of the citations from the bibliography or reference list.

To see if CSU Libraries subscribes to the journal cited, search through our alphabetical listing of online journals by clicking on ejournals A to Z in the Resources section of the library website.  Check to see if the year on your citation is covered in one of our databases.  If the article is not available from CSU Libraries you can order it through Interlibrary Loan by clicking on the Interlibrary Loan link in the resources section of the library website.  Log in with your Cougarnet login and fill out the article request using the citation information. This is a free article service and you will get an email to download the pdf when it arrives.  This typically takes1-5 business days so needs to be done ahead.