Blog

By Liv Bjerge Laursen

To make sure that course literature is always available to your students, we review every reading list submitted to Academic Books as well as all lists created in Course Readings on Canvas. We then go on to purchase print copies of items not available from our collections already and place them in the dedicated Course Collection. Where possible, we buy e-copies for our general collection. 

Feel free at any time to submit additional requests for the Course Collection if you wish to suggest supplementary readings for your students.

If you are not already using Course Readings in Canvas, this might be the perfect opportunity to get started and join the growing number of CBS faculty who want to take advantage of the technology to create, share, and share reading lists without hassle and to stay on top of copyright requirements at the same time. With Course Readings, your students will get easy, uniform, and equitable access to content, and you will never have to check and double-check links again, while at the same time you will be able to monitor your student cohort´s use of the literature.

Check out our guide: Using Course Readings in Canvas, where you will find more information and watch a short introductory video. 

If you would like help to get started with Course Readings, please contact your liaison librarian, who will be more than happy to help.

By Camilla Boelsgaard Lund

As members of faculty, you play a vital role in shaping how students approach their studies and research. One of the most impactful ways to support their success is by reminding them of the library’s resources. Many students underestimate the richness of the library resources - resources that are free to use and designed to help them succeed and thrive.

Four reasons students should take full advantage of the library:

1. Access to quality literature and research
   Students can move beyond basic web searches and draw from peer-reviewed journals, books, and databases that give them reliable and credible sources.

2.  

   Expert guidance from librarians
   Librarians are trained to help students refine their topics, navigate resources, and save time when doing so. 

3. Study spaces designed for learning
   Whether they need spaces for quiet reflection or collaborative work, students can always find a place to study that matches their personal study style.
4. Skill building for lifelong learning
   By learning to evaluate sources, use databases, and reference in an open and transparent way, students gain research skills that extend well beyond the classroom.

And here is the bonus: it helps you, too. 

Students who make use of these resources are often better prepared, more engaged, and produce higher-quality work. In addition, librarians can collaborate with you through tailored instruction sessions, resource guides, and research support.

Together, we can help students see the library not just as a building but as a good friend on their academic journey. A quick mention in Canvas or a reminder in class can open doors for them and lighten your teaching load at the same time. 

By René Steffensen

In February, CBS Library completed a strategy development project, the purpose of which is to ensure that we continue to be able to support CBS’s overall priorities and cross-cutting strategic initiatives.

As a result, the library will be even more dedicated to developing services within four of CBS’s strategic focal points:

• Artificial Intelligence: Together with suppliers, we will use AI to enhance platforms, personalize learning, and streamline administrative processes. We will emphasize fundamental academic skills such as reading, writing, and source criticism to ensure that the use of AI does not undermine these skills.
• Societal Impact: We aim to support positive change in the world by maintaining and developing our work in research communication and knowledge sharing. We will adopt a more dynamic role to become a network organization focused on active partnerships and interaction.
• Lifelong Learning: By adapting learning platforms, resources, and courses, we will support our users throughout their lifelong professional and personal development. At the same time, we will work to ensure that potential users develop a stronger and more lasting connection to CBS.
• Green Transition: We will contribute to CO2-reducing initiatives by setting requirements for suppliers and disclosing the climate footprint of our activities. We will draw inspiration from relevant sustainability programs for libraries and fully utilize these.

You can read more about this and more in our new 2025 strategy. In the very near future, we will start making plans and rolling out projects.

As an example of AI initiatives, a number of new research support tools are either already operational or in the pipeline, including ALMA Research Assistant, Overleaf, Keenious, and Scite.ai. We will make sure to keep you updated on these and other tools in our newsletter.

Read the CBS Library Strategy Paper 2025

By Liv Bjerge Laursen

That is because all EBSCOhost databases have undergone a transformation involving a brand-new interface and new search features.

Databases from EBSCOhost have been part and parcel of the CBS Library portfolio for many years and they have looked much the same for all those years. However, now there are new user interface and new search features to explore.

The new interface appears simpler and cleaner and boasts brand-new features including personalized dashboards and new ways to share and save resources. Navigation has moved to the left-hand panel below the search boxes, and the new user interface is responsive and optimized for mobile devices.

Advanced search with new options

If you go to Advanced Search and navigate to Search options below the search boxes, you will find some interesting new search methods:

• you search by proximity by default, which means that a simple search for two words like public governance without any further specifications will yield results where the words public and governance are separated by five words or less, in any order.
• If you want to search public governance as a compound noun or a phrase, you need to use the traditional inverted commas like so “public governance”.
• if you want to see all results that include both words regardless of the distance between them, we recommend that you run a classic Boolean search e.g.  public AND governance.

What is SmartText Searching?

EBSCOhost has also introduced SmartText Searching, which means that you can copy and paste large chunks of text into the search box, for example a paragraph or an entire page. SmartText Searching technology condenses the input text to the most important search terms based on term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF) calculations of the terms in the query and the databases searched, and then creates a weighted Boolean query for search execution.

Create a personal Dashboard

In My dashboard in the left-hand panel, you can create projects and collect within them references and searches under your own headlines. To get started with the My dashboard you need to create a personal account in EBSCOhost. If you had an account before the new user interface, that account is still active, and all you need to do is log in.

If you want to dive deeper into the EBSCOhost functionalities, new and old, check out the Quick Start Guide

You can also just jump into EBSCOhost at the deep end.

By Cecilia Lohse, Thomas Basbøl og Søren Madsen

“#N/A Review”

This has become an all too familiar error message for our users. Both our Bloomberg and Workspace/Datastream terminals are being used to access financial data at an accelerating rate, and our monthly data limits are being reached alarmingly early. In March, for example, it took only a few days before it was no longer possible to download data through our terminals.

At present, we have no effective way to police the use of our terminals and are relying on our students’ judgment and restraint in accessing data to ensure that other students are not left empty-handed.  

We are asking for your help in educating the students about the importance of sustainable data practices.

Some Possible Misunderstandings

We suspect that the problem arises from a number of misunderstandings:

Students may set up spreadsheets with functions that query the terminal for fresh data every time they open their project.

They may think that they need data on every company in an industry, where a random sample would be sufficient.

They may think that they need daily prices where monthly ones would do.

Also, they may believe that the better research project is the one that uses the most recent data available, so they will redo their entire analysis with fresh data immediately before submitting.

Better Living Through Data Management

To remedy this, we have a few suggestions:

The first is that, wherever possible, we ask you not to encourage the students to use “big data” approaches to research. We simply cannot offer all your students the amount of data they would need to do this kind of work.

Second, we ask you to explain that, for the purposes of any given assignment, they do not need 100 % current data.

Finally, unless your teaching objective is specifically related to the use of Bloomberg or Workspace, we ask you to suggest alternative sources of data, like the Orbis company database, which can often provide the same data.

More generally, if you are assigning or supervising research projects that make use of financial data, please contact our DataLab team, so that we can work together to find the best possible way to support your learning objectives while staying within the objective limits set by our data suppliers.

Contact: datalab.lib@cbs.dk

Written By Mette Bechmann

As always, the library is committed to ensuring smooth access to course literature for your students. We highly recommend using the Course Readings app in Canvas to streamline this process. 

By utilizing Course Readings, we can automatically check all readings submitted to Academic Books and those created within the app to make both print and, whenever possible, digital copies available to your students. This process also ensures that all materials comply with copyright guidelines.

Preparing a new course is the perfect opportunity to get started with Course Readings in Canvas. This tool not only simplifies the process but also guarantees seamless access for your students.

Get started by clicking Course Readings in the left-hand menu of your Canvas course or click here. 

We will of course continue to maintain a Course Collection in the Solbjerg Plads library for course literature that is not available digitally. For more details, please contact Nikolaj Kjær Jensen.

Illustration: Keenious

By Joshua Kragh Amudzidis-Bruhn

Meet Keenious, the newest addition to our family of databases

Keenious is an AI-based discovery tool that allows for full-text prompts. Simply input an abstract from an article that you are already familiar with or some of your own work, a memo or an early draft of a manuscript, and you are ready to go.

This makes Keenious particularly useful for students who are just embarking on a paper about a topic of which they have no deep-seated prior knowledge, or perhaps no knowledge at all. Or for you, when you find yourself struggling to introduce a particular perspective in your quest for relevant content and the keywords just keep getting it wrong or escape you altogether.

Keenious provides an intuitive interface to kickstart any research process. Simply input your prompt and Keenious will find relevant content from among the 100 million articles indexed by OpenAlex, a huge, open catalogue of scholarly papers, authors, and organizations.

Exactly because it works very differently from traditional discovery systems and is based on coherent prose and not keywords, which sometimes can prove quite rigid and unyielding, Keenious provides an alternative route to uncover valuable information that might otherwise be missed in traditional searches.

Keenious is an AI-based tool, but it does not contravene any of the restrictions imposed by CBS on the use of GenAI, so you can throw all caution to the wind and push it to your students without fear of violating the guidelines.

However, because it is AI-based, which can sometimes make it difficult to know exactly what goes on behind the scenes, we do not recommend Keenious as a standalone strategy to uncover scholarly content, but as an add-on to more traditional approaches.

Find out more
For now, we do not provide separate courses on Keenious. Instead, it is part and parcel of our regular courses on scholarly content for students and faculty. If you want to find out more and get started with Keenious, check out these resources or talk to your liaison librarian.

Help us
If you decide to start working with the solution, we are very eager to get any feedback you may have, good or bad, as well as relevant use cases, so please reach out if you want to help us understand the opportunities as well as the barriers that Keenious represents.

Illustration: Colourbox

By Mette Bechmann og Lotte Risbæk Thomsen

All CBS students and staff now have access to Fonde.dk, including Legathåndbogen, where you can find grants and stipends to fund your research projects, travels, studies, etc. 
On Fonde.dk you can look for funding for research projects, travels, studies, and a lot more.  Fonde.dk comprises more than 7.000 funds and grants.

You will also find relevant articles on how to apply for funds, specifically targeted at study and internship grants for students, as well as editable application and budget templates, that you can adapt for any purpose. 

You will get access by signing in via WAYF on https://www.fonde.dk/. We encourage researchers who are looking for research funding to reach out to the CBS Research Support Office. Please direct all other questions to Per Vilhem Hansen or Lotte Risbæk Thomsen.

By Mette Bechmann 

Are your students grappling with citations and other formatting issues in their thesis work?

If so, help them succeed by directing them to CBS Library's expert assistance, conveniently located outside the library at Solbjerg Plads. Our citation specialists will be standing ready to provide individual guidance on in-text citations and bibliographies, formatting, use of generative AI under the current guidelines, etc.  

We understand the importance of accurate referencing in scholarly work, and our team is well-equipped to assist with APA as well as other citation styles. Additionally, we offer support and advice on reference management software, the research process, and efficient source management.

By making them aware of our service, you can ensure that your students receive the necessary assistance to excel in their academic work. They can find us outside the library at Solbjerg Plads, so please send them our way.

You will find the location and time slots in the library course calendar. 

By Joshua Kragh Bruhn

Don´t forget to keep an eye out for CBS Library Forum events. Every month, CBS Library joins forces with CBS researchers to zoom in on current topics and events and state-of-art research, right in the heart of the Solbjerg Plads library.

This fall, we will explore:

• Clean and sustainable energy systems with Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure 
• Diversity in entrepreneurship with Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship
•  

Stay abreast with the CBS Library event calendar. New events will be added on an ongoing basis.