UNIVERSITY PARK — The University Libraries, in collaboration with the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, is presenting a series of free virtual seminars beginning April 23 to highlight essential data skills that graduate students can utilize throughout the research data life cycle.
“Research Data Skills for Graduate Students” will offer graduate students an opportunity to learn more about and improve their skills in the areas of data management, data analysis, data visualization and data publishing.
All sessions will begin at 3 p.m. Advance registration is required. For more information, contact Briana Ezray, research data librarian for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), at bde125@psu.edu.
Following is a schedule of seminar topics and dates:
How to Create a Data Management Plan (DMP) For Your Dissertation or Thesis
Thursday, April 23
Throughout your graduate program, you likely will either gather or create a significant amount of digital data. Creating a data management plan (DMP) can help you plan and organize how these data will be managed during project implementation and shared upon project completion. In this session, you will learn about the components of a DMP and how to create a personalized DMP for your dissertation or thesis.
Facilitator: Briana Ezray. Register here.
Active Data Management I
Friday, April 24
Actively managing data during project implementation is vital for research transparency and reproducibility. In addition, actively managing data will make it easier to share data publicly or with your PI upon project completion. In this session, you will learn about the best practices for file organization and naming, methods to share files during data collection, and version control.
Facilitator: Briana Ezray. Register here.
Active Data Management II
Thursday, April 30
Actively managing data during project implementation is vital for research transparency and reproducibility. In addition, actively managing data will make it easier to share data publicly or with your PI upon project completion. In this session, you will learn about how to properly store and back up your data during data collection as well as resources at Penn State to support these activities.
Facilitator: Briana Ezray. Register here.
Citation Management Using Mendeley and Zotero
Friday, May 1
In this session, you will learn about how to use the citation management tools Mendeley and Zotero to organize citations and create bibliographies.
Facilitator: Elise Gowen, Earth and Mineral Sciences librarian. Register here.
How to Find and Evaluate Data for Re-use
Thursday, May 7
Immense amounts of data are available for re-use. In this session, we will discuss how to find data sources and evaluate if the data source is appropriate for the analysis you want to conduct.
Facilitator: Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, head, Research Informatics and Publishing. Register here.
How to Conduct a Meta-Analysis
Friday, May 8
Meta-analyses allow researchers to synthesize the results of numerous studies. In this session, we will discuss how to conduct a meta-analysis including designing research questions, wrangling data from multiple sources, and performing analyses.
Facilitator: Briana Ezray. Register here.
How to Wrangle Data Using R
Thursday, May 14
In this session, we will focus on how to wrangle data in R. Specifically, you will learn how to manage, clean, and transform data into tidy or model-ready format as well as create new variables. Please note that this webinar expects basic understanding of R.
Facilitator: Briana Ezray. Register here.
Working Remotely with Geospatial Data and Mapping Projects
Friday, May 15
This session will introduce graduate students to geospatial data from U.S. and international sources, along with information on geospatial software access at Penn State including ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS ArcMap, and ArcGIS Pro. A highlight of online geospatial resources available to graduate students will be included. Additional resources will be provided to help participants manage geospatial projects remotely.
Facilitator: Tara Anthony, GIS specialist. Register here.
How to Create a README File
Thursday, May 21
A README file accompanies published data to provide information about the data to aid in future discoverability, interpretability, and reusability. This session will provide an overview and discussion of how to create a README file and what information to include in it.
Facilitator: Seth Erickson, research data librarian for social sciences. Register here.
How to Prepare Data for Publication
Friday, May 22
With the adoption of open data initiatives and increasing mandates from funders and publishers, data are increasingly being shared via publication in data repositories. This session will provide information on how to prepare data for publication, including an examination of metadata standards, best practices for data documentation, and methods for selecting a data repository, as well as a discussion of ways to get credit for your data products.
Facilitators: Maurie Kelly, senior research associate, Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment and director, Penn State Data Commons; Briana Ezray. Register here.
Statistical Software Choices: Get Your Data Analysis Done at Home
Thursday, May 28
“What analytic tool should I use for my statistical data analysis?” This is a question you should think about as early as when you are writing your project proposal. It is important due to four factors: software cost, time required to learn, capability of modeling, and accessibility (especially during this all-remote period). This session will provide a brief overview of widely used statistical software packages, including SPSS, Stata, RStudio, Minitab, JMP, SAS and Mplus.
Facilitator: Lizhao Ge, statistical information specialist. Register here.
Tools for Data Visualization
Friday, May 29
Sharing research results is a critical step for any research project; thus effective communication of research results is vital. In this session, we will discuss the traits of effective and meaningful data visualizations and provide overviews of how to use various tools to create data visualizations. There will be three separate breakout rooms for the following tools: (1) Tableau/Power BI, (2) R/Adobe Illustrator, and (3) GIS software.
Facilitators: Xuying Xin, data analyst; Briana Ezray, Lizhao Ge, Tara Anthony. Register here.
What Do Data Curators Do?
Thursday, June 4
What happens to your data after you publish it? In this session, we will provide an overview of what curators do in general, as well as a panel discussion with the Penn State ScholarSphere data curators.
Facilitators: Hannah Hadley, data curation education librarian; Briana Ezray, Xuying Xin, Seth Erickson. Register here.