Gaining Research Skills: Sage Campus

To help you with developing your project, understanding various methodologies, and looking ahead to sharing your work via publication, we want to share an additional resource called Sage Campus, which is available through NU Libraries. Sage Campus is a suite of self-paced online mini-courses focused on research and data literacy skills (including learning R and Python) to give you an accessible and flexible way to develop your skills. You have access to the full suite of courses by completing an initial registration with your Northwestern email address.​

​Below, we have clustered some courses by relevance to a particular aspect of the research process or methodology: General Research, Qualitative Skills, Quantitative Skills, Publishing Your Work, and Exploring Methodologies. There are likely far more courses in a cluster than are relevant to you given your project or stage in the research process, so feel free to only explore those that sound interesting or particularly helpful. You may choose to fully complete a course to obtain a course completion certificate, or you may choose a specific component of a course that directly addresses a problem you have encountered in your research or an element of a skill you would like to gain.​

To learn from these courses, click on a course title to view the course details about what is covered.

General Research Skills Course Cluster

Northwestern Libraries also provide workshops on topics like citation management, practical copyright considerations, literature reviews, and GIS software!

• Critical Reading and Writing (2 hrs to learn)
• Critical Thinking (10 hrs to learn)
• Develop Your Search Strategy (3 hrs to learn)
• Fact-Checking Sources (2 hrs to learn)

Exploring Methodologies Course Cluster

• Collecting Social Media Data (6 hrs to learn)
• Do Your Interviews (5 hrs to learn)
• Gather Your Data Online (4 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to Text Mining (10 hrs to learn)
• Ethnography for Beginners (3 hrs to learn)
• Gathering Evidence for a Systematic Review (4 hrs to learn)
• Unlocking Voices: Research with Historically Marginalized Communities (4 hrs to learn)
• Digital Humanities for Beginners (3 hrs to learn)
• Applied Digital Humanities (3 hrs to learn)
• Digital Methods for Beginners (3 hrs to learn)
• Write a Questionnaire (2 hrs to learn)
• Plan Your Focus Group (4 hrs to learn)
• Run Your Focus Group (4 hrs to learn)

Qualitative Skills Course Cluster

• Collecting Social Media Data (6 hrs to learn)
• Research Design in Social Data Science (6 hrs to learn)
• Sampling for Beginners (3 hrs to learn)
• Do Your Interviews (5 hrs to learn)
• Write a Questionnaire (2 hrs to learn)
• Plan Your Focus Group (4 hrs to learn)
• Run Your Focus Group (4 hrs to learn)
• Analyze Qualitative Data (5 hrs to learn)
• Working With Transcribed Data (2 hrs to learn)

Quantitative Skills Course Cluster

Northwestern’s Research Computing and Data Services also provides support for data science and visualization, computing, and data-management (including R and Python) through workshops and individual consulting for statistics.

• Gather Your Data Online (4 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to Data Management (4 hrs to learn)
• Cleaning Messy Data (3 hrs to learn)
• Know Your Numbers (5 hrs to learn)
• See Numbers in Data (5 hrs to learn)
• Statistical Significance (4 hrs to learn)
• Unlocking Statistics: From Hypothesis to Outcome (6 hrs to learn)
• Fundamentals of Quantitative Text Analysis (15 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to Text Mining (10 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to R (20 hrs to learn)
• Practical Data Management with R (30 hrs to learn)
• Interactive Visualization with R (40 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to Data Visualization (12 hrs to learn)
• Introduction to Python (24 hrs to learn)
• Intermediate Python Skills (25 hrs to learn)

Publishing Your Work Course Cluster

• Introduction to Journal Publishing: Why Publish (2 hrs to learn)
• Choosing a Journal (1.5 hrs to learn)
• How to Write a Journal Article 1: Putting Your Article Together (3 hrs to learn)
• How to Write a Journal Article 2: Supplementary Material (2 hrs to learn)
• Submission and Final Touches (2 hrs to learn)
• Peer Review, Feedback, and Decisions (1.5 hrs to learn)
• Article Acceptance to Promotion (1.5 hrs to learn)