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.
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)