Introduction to CSUSB ScholarWorks: How-to Guide for Grad Students
What is CSUSB ScholarWorks?
CSUSB ScholarWorks is an open access institutional repository showcasing and preserving the research, scholarship, and publications of California State University, San Bernardino faculty, staff, and students. The repository is a service of the John M. Pfau Library.
Graduate students completing a master's thesis/project or a doctoral dissertation at CSUSB upload their work to CSUSB ScholarWorks as part of the process of finishing their degree. We hope you will you want to make your work Open Access, but if you prefer not to, there are options for restricting access to it.
- Open Access: Once published, your manuscript is available freely on the Web, and others can easily discover it via Google Scholar.
- Restricted Access: Your manuscript can only be accessed by CSUSB students, staff and faculty on campus or via off-campus login; only the citation and abstract are available on the Web.
How it works!
Submitting your thesis, project, or dissertation to CSUSB ScholarWorks is easy! Think of it as two steps:
- Create your account.
- Upload your document.
IMPORTANT: Make sure you start in the Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations section of ScholarWorks.
DON'T LOOK FOR YOUR DEPARTMENT! Submitting under your department page in ScholarWorks will only cause delays, because you will have to re-submit your thesis in the Electronic Theses section.
Step by step...
Click the "Submit Research" link in the sidebar:
You will be prompted to login. But first, you will need to sign up for a CSUSB ScholarWorks account. TIP: Using your MyCoyote login will NOT work!
Fill out the form that appears. You can use either your CSUSB email account or a personal email account.
TIPS:
- Your review memo from the Office of Graduate Studies will be sent to the email address you provided for the ScholarWorks account.
- Use the same ScholarWorks account for corrections – don’t create a new account each time!
When you click the Create Account button, you will get an Account Activation message, telling you to open your confirmation email:
Jump over to your email account and find the confirmation message. TIP: The sender will be noreply@bepress.com and the subject will be Confirm Your Account.
Open the message, and click the Confirm Account button, as shown here:
If you kept your browser window open, you should then be on the theses "Submission Agreement" page, which looks like this:
TIP: If for any reason you don't end up on this page, navigate back to Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations and use the Submit Research link again.
At the bottom of the Submission Agreement, mark the box for agreement, then click Continue.
Now you will be on the actual submission form to upload your thesis, project, or dissertation! It's a long form, but just fill out all the requested fields.
Do you have a co-author?
You should both create ScholarWorks accounts, so that both of you can receive email notices and download statistics. However, only one of you should submit the actual document. Use the green plus mark under author name to add your coauthor. Search for them by the email address they used to created their ScholarWorks account.
Restricted or open access?
Don't forget to choose the level of access for your document under "Document Type"! Restricted access will be noted as such; open access is the default.
"Contact Author" button
Please consider adding a "Contact Author" button to your published thesis page. We sometimes get requests from outside researchers who want permission to reuse part of a thesis, or have questions about the research, but we cannot help, because we have no way to contact the student who wrote the thesis. Use an email address that you will still have after you graduate--so, not your CSUSB email account.
Uploading your document
At the bottom of the form, you will choose your file to upload, then click the Submit button:
TIP: You do not need to convert your document to a PDF; ScholarWorks will do that automatically.
Once you click the Submit button, you should then get a confirmation email from ScholarWorks that your submission has been successful.
No confirmation? Get in touch with Shelby Reader in the CSUSB Office of Graduate Studies.
When you need to make revisions...
Make the revisions to your original word processing document and save it. You will revise your submitted thesis by uploading the file you just corrected and saved.
Log back into ScholarWorks, click your thesis title, and choose the Revise submission option:
Again, remember to upload your revised document; you cannot edit the text of your thesis or project within ScholarWorks!