Preparatory lessons for clinical students (MSc/PhD)

The preparatory lessons are designed just for you, MSc/PhD students from a dental background. Though you are experts in dental practice, you learned very few things about scientific methods and knew little about academic practice during your college days. Therefore, you are not well equipped to enter a graduate course for scientific research.

Are you calling for aid for your first presentation during this seminar?

And Rohan will answer.

For a general reference, please see my course

Here are the 'Preparatory lessons' for the MSc/PhD students from a clinical background. All the lessons can be taken online with video classes in Mandarin Chinese and English. You are encouraged to take the lessons on 7 topics before you enter the seminar this year.

This year (2022) the lessons include:

How to do 're-search' using PubMed and Google Scholar
PICO - How to define your research aims
When/Where/How to cite others' work
How to interpret statistical graphs decently (2021 New!)
How to estimate the sample size of a study (2021 New!)
How to decently organize your slides
How to give a presentation as if you were the boss?

And just before you start the lessons, please visit the short game Scholar Things (15-20min to play), which tells you why research methods are that important!

(And visit our studios for more game!)

Hour 1: How to do 're-search' using PubMed and Google Scholar

You will learn

What is PubMed / MEDLINE
What is MeSH
What are 'tags' and 'fields'
Search history / Search details
h index / h5 index
Google Scholar

References

Google Scholar Metrics https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/metrics.html
PubMed MeSG https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/
PubMed Journals https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals/
PubMed Tags https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmedtutorial/020_710.html

To-dos

Search for the papers that published by your supervisor /lab members on a specific topic
Estimate how many papers have been published on your research topic

Chinese (39 min)

English (A) (16 min)

English (B) (21 min)

Hour 2: PICO - How to define your research aims

You will learn

What is PICO
What is an 'association' / 'cause-effect'
What is an independent / dependent variable
What is a confounding variable

References

Oxford CEBM course on PICO https://www.cebm.net/2014/06/finding-the-evidence-1-using-pico-to-formulate-a-search-question/
Hill's criteria of casuality by Coursera https://www.coursera.org/lecture/epidemiology/bradford-hill-criteria-qXlFt

To-dos

Design the PICO for you preliminary topic
(Very quickly) identify the PICO for all papers from an issue of the journal that you're interested in

Chinese (27 min)

English (A) (19 min)

English (B) (20 min)

Hour 3: When/Where/How to cite others' work?

You will learn

What does plagiarism mean?
What is parenthetical citation?
What is in-text citation?
Citation style

References

University of Oxford https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism
Center for Taiwan Academic Research Ethics Education (AREE) (臺灣學術倫理教育推廣資源中心) https://ethics-p.moe.edu.tw/static/ethics/u10/p02.html

Chinese (20 min)

English (A) (27 min)

English (B) (17 min)

Hour 4: How to interpret statistical graphs decently

You will learn

A better way to describe a bar chart
A better way to describe a scatter plot
The five elements for a better interpretation of a chart
A focus on research variables
A focus on strength of the association (between variables)
A focus on quality of the association

References

Chinese (34 min)

English (20 min)

Hour 5: How to estimate the sample size of a study

You will learn

Does the size matter?
Power analysis
Key conditions for estimating the sample size
How to estimate the effect size
How to decide α and β
GETTING TO KNOW YOUR FIELD FIRST

References

Chinese (39 min)

English (25 min)

Hour 6: How to decently organize your slides

You will learn

How to avoid some 'bad mistakes' in your slides

References

Daniel Wolpert's TEDGlobal talk (2011) https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains
Charles Limb's TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv

To-dos

Design a 3 page slide to introduce a topic that you are interested in

Chinese (27 min)

English (24 min)

Hour 7: How to give a presentation as if you were the boss?

You will learn

Two basic styles of giving a presentation in an academic events
Three HUGE mistakes that you should never conduct!

References

Vilayanur Ramachandran's TED talk (2007) https://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_3_clues_to_understanding_your_brain?language=en

To-dos

Give a 5-minute talk to the 3-page slide
Give a 2-minute talk to the 3-page slide

Chinese (31 min)

Google Sites

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