Welcome! 
This guide is designed to support your research process.
Use the tabs to the left to navigate through the pages of the guide. Feel free to contact Social Science Librarian Ann Matsushima Chiu to make a personal research appointment.
Seniors who are working on their thesis can request books for the library to purchase. The average amount of books that thesising seniors request is between 3-5 titles. Print titles may take 4-6 weeks to arrive and processed so please request early in the semester. Ebooks can be made available quicker, so you may choose this option if the title is available in electronic form. For those requesting subscriptions or other rarer or specialized materials, please contact your librarian.
All books checked out to Seniors may be checked out until the end of your graduating semester. If a book you need is checked out, you may ask staff at the circulation desk to place a hold on it. If you need it sooner than its due date and it has been on loan for at least two weeks, you may request its recall. You are notified when the book comes in; pickup is at the Holds Shelf in the Library lobby.
Currently, the library is able to offer thesis shelving and lockers. These shelves are there by request in order to provide you with a place to keep books that are checked out to you.
If you are interested in having assigned shelf space, please fill out this form. The library will email you the shelf space #. Thesis shelves are located at the south end of south stacks in lower level one of the library (please see attached map). If you have any questions, please contact library-circ@reed.edu. There are also lockers available. See the front desk to reserve one.
The Thesis Temple Style Guide works well with Zotero. If you begin writing in the thesis template in the beginning, and document your citations in Zotero, it will be relatively smooth to insert your references, footnotes, endnotes into your thesis. See the Zotero research guide for more information.
The thesis templates are pre-made documents in which to write your thesis, so that it is formatted correctly for the Library and Registrar's Office. CUS provides downloadable templates for both Word and LaTeX. We recommend writing your thesis in the template from the beginning.
For in-person help using the thesis templates, drop-in consulting is available any time the CUS Help Desk is open. Or you can email CUS or call at x7525. The sooner you come with questions, the better!
Do you need support around brainstorming, getting research tips, search strategies, database tutorials, book ordering, citation management support, etc? Make an appointment with the Social Sciences librarian! I am willing to meet at Commons, at a coffeeshop, your thesis desk, classroom, my office in the library, or on Zoom. The goal is to get you comfortable with research and feeling confident when writing your thesis.
This work by the Reed College Library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International License.
Reed College Library | Email: library@reed.edu | Phone: 503-777-7702 | 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202-8199
