Every student brings their own individual set of educational and personal experiences to a research project, and peer research consultants are uniquely able to reveal this “hidden curriculum” to the researchers they assist.
 
In seven highly readable chapters, How to Be a Peer Research Consultant provides focused support for anyone preparing undergraduate students to serve as peer research consultants, whether you refer to these student workers as research tutors, reference assistants, or research helpers. Inside you’ll find valuable training material to help student researchers develop metacognitive, transferable research skills and habits, as well as foundational topics like what research looks like in different disciplines, professionalism and privacy, ethics, the research process, inclusive research consultations, and common research assignments. It concludes with an appendix containing 30 activities, discussion questions, and written reflection prompts to complement the content covered in each chapter, designed to be easily printed or copied from the book.
 
How to Be a Peer Research Consultant can be read in its entirety to gather ideas and activities, or it can be distributed to each student as a training manual. It pays particular attention to the peer research consultant-student relationship and offers guidance on flexible approaches for supporting a wide range of research needs. The book is intended to be useful in a variety of higher education settings and is designed to be applicable to each institution’s unique library resources and holdings. Through mentoring and coaching, undergraduate students can feel confident in their ability to help their peers with research and may be inspired to continue this work as professional librarians in the future.
 

“It reads as if you have an expert coach in business reference helping you each step of the way." That’s how Academic BRASS summarized the first edition of this unique, unparalleled resource authored by Ross, a past winner of the Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship. Now she’s revised and updated it to tackle even more “bizref” headscratchers related to investment and finance, consumer behavior and statistics, company, and industry research. In addition to general reference strategies in each chapter that give you the lay of the land, inside you’ll find

• overviews of more than fifty databases for articles, company and industry, directories, consumer, international, or raw data;
• 33 real-life "Stumper" questions, all new for this edition, drawn from librarians in the field;
• why asking “who cares about this kind of question” reveals potential sources;
• techniques for applying reference interview techniques to business questions;
• advice on where to find the numbers for answering finance questions;
• expanded coverage of venture capital research and business information literacy;
• “Start Making Sense” suggestions for further skill-building; and
• questions to consider when building a bizref collection.

This is the guide to keep at your side when serving business students, job-seekers, investors, or entrepreneurs in your library.