Cal State LA Library Award for Research Excellence

Cal State LA University Library's Award for Research Excellence recognizes and honors the academic achievement of Cal State LA students. The awards are given to undergraduate students who demonstrate excellent research strategies and the use of Library services and collections. 

We offer two award categories with $500 in prize money each:

• Information Literacy Award: Granted to an undergraduate student who evaluates and integrates information sources located through the Library's digital and/or print collections. Community sources of information are also encouraged, but some of your sources cited must come from the Library's collections or through our library lending program (CSU+). 
• Special Collections and Archives Award: Granted to an undergraduate student who incorporates primary source materials from any manuscript, photograph or rare book collection housed within the Cal State LA Department of Special Collections and Archives. You may submit a paper you already completed for a credit-bearing course or revise a paper previously written for a credit-bearing course. 

Revising and improving a previously submitted and graded research project is allowed and encouraged.

Please review these eligibility requirements before submitting: 

• Students must be officially enrolled as a Cal State LA student at the time of submission (part-time or full-time).
• The research paper must have originally been completed for a credit-bearing course at Cal State LA. 
• Submissions from any discipline are eligible
• You agree to let us upload your research paper to our institutional repositories (ScholarWorks and Luna). Students retain all rights to their work. 

You must submit an original research paper written for a credit-bearing course at Cal State LA. You are also required to submit a Reflective Essay and bibliography of your sources. The reflective essay carries the most points in the scoring process. Please refer to the Guidelines for Submission for advice on writing your Reflective Essay and citation help.

You will submit one file with the three components:

1. Original research paper
2. Bibliography/references
3. Reflective Essay

An interdisciplinary committee of library workers, faculty, and Cal State LA students will review and rank the submissions. The submissions will be scored based off of these rubrics: