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:

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

  2. PICO - How to define your research aims

  3. When/Where/How to cite others' work

  4. How to interpret statistical graphs decently (2021 New!)

  5. How to estimate the sample size of a study (2021 New!)

  6. How to decently organize your slides

  7. 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

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

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

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

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)