The Emerson Research Hub in collaboration with the Iwasaki Library and the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship have put together a resource guide to outline offices at Emerson that provide research capacity support for faculty.
Available Resources for Faculty
Faculty Development Funds
Faculty development funds can be used to purchase materials needed for research at any time. Uses of these funds may include travel for conferences and research trips, purchasing recently published print or digital works, as well as licensing for film content and streaming subscriptions and other materials where no institutional subscription or purchase option is available.
To learn more about what these funds support, visit:
To learn more about Faculty Development Funds, please contact your department chair or Dean.
Emerson Research Hub
The Emerson Research Hub is positioned to support faculty advancement in research capacity and creative practice. The Hub can offer financial support for faculty identifying opportunities to advance or complete research projects through the Hub Fund for Advancing Research. Support from the Hub Fund can include:
- Completing book manuscripts/scripts: Including copyediting, indexing and related work
- Fees to support research visibility: publishing-related fees, submission fees to film festivals, etc.
- Funds to attain research materials: Access to academic books, to archives, and other research-related activities.
Please note that the Hub Fund will only support research advancement opportunities after Faculty Development funds have been allocated for the academic year, or projects that require support before the award cycles for the Faculty Advancement Fund Grant (FAFG) or the Affiliated Faculty Development Fund (AFDF). Faculty can only receive support from the Hub Fund once per calendar year. Funds are limited and reserved for advancement of research, not to support the entirety of projects. Hub Fund support generally must be used within six months of the award date.
Travel to academic conferences will only be considered in certain circumstances. Support for academic travel should come from Faculty Development Funds.
To learn more about the Research Hub and the Hub Fund for Advancing Research, please reach out to: researchhub [at] emerson.edu (researchhub[at]emerson[dot]edu).
Office of Research & Creative Scholarship
The Office of Research and Creative Scholarship (ORCS) advances the College's mission by assisting faculty, staff, and students in seeking external funding (grants) to support their research, scholarship, and creative work. ORCS offers a wide range of resources to support the Emerson community in their pursuit of research and scholarship goals and funding sources, including:
- Writing and Submitting Proposals: Includes information on the pre-approval process, working with ORCS on proposal development, budgeting guidance, and templates for proposal components, including grant budgets, and biosketches.
- orcs [at] emerson.edu (Consultation:) Contact ORCS staff to explore funding opportunities, assess readiness to submit a proposal, and pursue conceptual brainstorming, team building, and competitive intelligence.
- Internal Grants: ORCS manages the application process and management of several internal funding initiatives.
- Research Training and Certifications: ORCS subscribes to CITI Training to provide online training and certifications required for human subjects research and other certifications required for federally funded research.
- Workshops: ORCS hosts several online workshops per year on the grant process, finding funding, and post-award management and spending.
- Guidance with post-award transactions: Includes how-to's and the rules governing the spending of internal and eternal grant funds; how to hire student assistants; allowable and unallowable costs; purchasing gift cards for human subject participants; and contracting with outside service providers.
Iwasaki Library
The Iwasaki Library supports faculty access to research materials. Content can include print and digital books, and films, journals, and databases. The Library's Guide for Faculty shares the library's support offerings in more detail.
The following mechanisms for support are available to faculty:
- Physical and Digital Media: See the Library Catalog for a full list of academic resource. Iwasaki Library has a teaching DVD collection, circulating DVDs, and subscriptions to databases of digital media. Digital media purchased with faculty development funds can be stored in Panopto.
- Journals and Databases: See the List of Research Databases (100+), Search for subscription publication titles (100,000+), or Link to Emerson's full text access from Google Scholar to find academic resources to support research at Emerson.
- Archives and Special Collections: Iwasaki Library can assist faculty in finding Archives and Special Collections.
- InterLibrary Loan (ILL) and area libraries, including Fenway Library Organization consortium partners, Boston Public Library ecard for online resources available to anyone who primary place of work is in Massachusetts.
Research Tools
Emerson faculty have access to a number of tools to help advance their research, scholarship, and academic inquiry.
The following research tools are available to faculty:
- Proquest Pivot is a campus-wide subscription to a comprehensive gloabl source of funding opportunities. It includes opportunities from federal agencies, private sponsors, foreign governments, industry, and non-profits. It is regularly maintained, curated, and edited, so that your research results are tied to your areas of interest. Sign into Pivot using your Emerson credentials.
- Zotero is a citation manager used to keep track of the references and output them in a variety of formats. You can use it to create footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations, and full bibliographies. Computers in the Iwasaki Library have Zotero installed, but to get the most out of it, you'll need to install it on your personal computer. You can create a free Zotero account using your Emerson email (gives you unlimited storage).
- Qualtrics is the College approved application for designing and sending surveys. It can be used for market research, academic research, and employee and customer experience management. Standard access to Qualtrics is available to all Emerson campus users via Duo Single Sign-on.
- SPSS, or Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is a software program that can be used to analyze quantitative data, edit data, and perform statistical analysis. It is available on campus in all Emerson Apple Labs.
- ATLAS.ti is a software package used for qualitative data analysis, helping organize and analyze large amounts of unstructured data like text, audio, video, and images. Please contact the Research Hub to request access to ATLAS.ti.