Methodology of Research and Information Sources

Garant předmětu:

Lecturer:

Tutor:

Supervisor:

Department of Biomedical Technology

Synopsis:

The course deals with the following topics: characteristics of research and science, types of research, links to legislation and financial resources, research projects, grant applications and grant process; basic characteristics and specifics of a scientific text, content of individual sections; publishing practices, publication ethics, citations sources, information sources; typographic rules, mathematical typesetting, text corrections; principles for creating presentations, presentation of results in the form of tables, graphs and diagrams.

Requirements:

Elaboration of all required preparations and individual work according to the assignment of teachers, continuously during the whole semester at the set deadlines and in the required quality. Presentation of assigned individual works of students in front of the whole group according to the teacher's instructions, within the set deadlines and in the required quality. Active participation in the class, including e. g. discussions on the presentations and work of colleagues. Excused absence in justified cases. Successful completion of the final written credit test of knowledge, which may include both test or open questions, as well as a part of the professional text with which the student will work. Some questions may have more weight in the evaluation than others, for example those that are more complex or difficult.

Course grading follows the ECTS scale, when the timely submission of all tasks in the required quality makes up 50% of the grade and the final written credit test of course lecture, exercise and assigned independent study content also makes up 50% of the grade.

Syllabus of lectures:

•Introduction, objectives of the course. Characteristics of research and science, types of research, links to legislation and financial resources.

•Basic characteristics and specifics of scientific text.

•Requirements for abstracts and their structure. Content of individual sections. Publication practices.

•Requirements for theses and their structure, requirements for journal articles and their structure. Content of individual sections. Publication practices.

•Citation sources, most frequently used citation styles.

•Principles for creating a scientific text – specifics of Czech and English professional language.

•Typography and typographic rules, numerical typography, mathematical typesetting.

•Proofreading and proofreading marks. Publication process.

•Information sources – types, relevance and credibility. Electronic information sources (freely available and accessible via the CTU portal). State of the art of a research topic – possibilities and procedures.

•Presentation of expert studies - types and options, requirements and principles.

•Presentation of results in the form of tables, graphs, and diagrams. Presentation of statistical analysis outputs in graphs.

•Multimedia presentation of scientific results, principles for creating presentations and for presenting, technical possibilities.

•Publication ethics. Ethics of research studies. Registry of clinical studies. Requirements of ICMJE, CONSORT and others.

•Research projects. Grant applications and grant process. Grant agencies.

Syllabus of tutorials:

Exercises from the course Working with information resources and research methodology are conceived as one big block, whose aim is to teach students and give them practical experience in planning, preparing and conducting research involving human subjects. Each semester a new topic is presented to the students in the form of a research question to be answered by results of a clinical study. Typically, this is a real study, approved by the FBMI Ethics Committee, where volunteers are the students of the course, and other FBMI students if more probands are needed. Given that the difficulty of the individual phases strongly depends on the selected topic, its elaboration and available scientific literature, as well as the varying difficulty of preparing the experimental set-up and other influences, it is not possible to allocate exact hours to the individual phases. Throughout the semester, however, all the following topics will be covered, with students working under the direct guidance of the teachers on their own:

•Survey of the current state of the art, overview of research studies and their results.

•Variants and definition of a research question, hypothesis.

•Correct writing of an overview of the current state of the art and the resulting hypotheses as a research objective.

•Design of the study protocol.

•Preparation of informed consent, preparation and submission of materials for the FBMI Ethics Committee for study approval.

•Preparation and construction of an experimental set-up for the realization of the study.

•Beginning of the approved study.

•Data acquisition from the first few probands, verification and possibly modification the study protocol or the experimental set-up.

•Decisions on the methodology of results processing, its verification, preparation of initial graphs and other outputs.

•Discussion of statistical methods, decisions on methods of statistical data processing.

•Discussion of (preliminary) results, their presentation, and conclusions of the study.

On each subtopic, students elaborate (usually as homework) their own versions of documents, proposals and preparations, which are evaluated and commented on during the exercises. Furthermore, if necessary, the final versions of the documents are produced by the compilation of the students’ partial work - such as the informed consent, application for the FBMI Ethics Committee, study protocol (according to which the study will actually run) and other documents.

Note: During one semester, all phases of the above can be done well. However, it is almost impossible to measure data on a specified number of probands. Therefore, data processing, statistics, presentation of results, etc. are performed only on a limited number of probands.

Study Objective:

Study materials:

Required literature:

•ZEIGER, Mimi. Essentials of writing biomedical research papers. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. xii, 440 p. ISBN 9780071345446.

•GUSTAVII, Bjorn. How to write and illustrate scientific papers. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 9780511394638.

•MOTULSKY, Harvey. Intuitive biostatistics: a nonmathematical guide to statistical thinking. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxxv, 540 p. ISBN 978-0-19-994664-8.

Suggested literature:

•DAY, Robert A. a Barbara GASTEL. How to write and publish a scientific paper. Eighth edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 326 stran. ISBN 978-1-316-64043-2.

Note:

Further information:

No time-table has been prepared for this course

The course is a part of the following study plans:

• Prospectus - magisterský (!)
• Biomedical and Clinical Engineering (compulsory course)