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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the second video in this lecture series or about I can get involved in research during medical school. So that's on. As with all I would cover for too long on the content slides. I'm sure you can just pause on this slide in your own time and read through it if you'd like, um, so ways of getting involved in research. Um, the first way is obviously an interrelated degree, which many of you would have heard about. It's a great way to pursue an interest of yours, and you're likely to get at least one publication out of it depends on what degree you're doing. Of course, if it's the bachelors or a master's, they're obviously pros and cons of both. Um, so it better equips you with skills to do clinical, Um, and, to a lesser extent, academic research alongside medical practice. So, options of doing either, uh, bachelor's or master's, um really depends which one you pick. Um obviously, uh, to determine whether you have chances of getting a publication, um, and determining how much experience you'll get within the labs, um, and doing clinical or academic research and so on. um so the bachelor's would be after second year of medical school, whereas the master's would be after a year three. Uh, then the MD PhD. It's really only relevant if you know you want to go into academic medicine. If so, it can be a huge boost. Your C V as usually multiple papers can be published from it, and it's also quite useful. Or if you're planning on applying for the academic foundation program or the SFP and it's now known and then internships replacements in clinical research. Um, so these could be in clinical research and maybe hospital or lab based. Uh, you may not always get a publication, but skills gain can be invaluable on your CV. Um, so this is for when applying for, uh, integrated degrees, the MD PhD, Uh, and any further internships and also, um, any research projects that you might apply to later? Uh, you could find an ongoing project your university, uh, by other contacting potential supervisors or just reaching out to research associated societies. Um, like, for example, Walter E Dandy. Um, we have plenty of research going on. And if you're interested in joining or you have, uh the necessary skills, and you think you can make a valuable contribution to any projects. And please do reach out, um, and keep an eye out for the committee applications as well. So contacting central supervisors. That's one possible way I'll be going through how you can effectively do that later on. In this video, you can also start doing independent research. You could identify gaps in the literature and maybe start writing a review, the literature review or a systematic review, or even a letter to the edit. Er. A letter to the editors, as I previously explained, is where you try to identify things that could be improved upon in a particular publication and and just send those comments or thoughts that you have to the editors of the Journal. Um, so these could be any comments or he doesn't have to be, uh, constructive criticisms. It could also be, um I think congratulated. More positive feedback. Want to do that? Yes. Um, so, yeah, that's pretty much all is all this slide? Okay, Getting involved in neurosurgical research. Um, as many of you know, your oh surgery is a very competitive specialty. Therefore, you need to have a strong CV and portfolio for the application. So giving yourself plenty of time to find the relevant opportunities to accumulate experience, Um, and you can do your CV with those, um, so doing that is quite important. But starting early to get enough experience is also necessary. Um, but at the same time, realizing that you want to go into neurosurgery, uh is something that takes a lot of time, Um, for a lot of us, because we need to get the relevant experience. So the most important thing is to start early and, um, initially start by getting enough experience in the field of neurosurgery. So this is either by internships and placements, which can be competitive, or by reaching out to societies associated with neurosurgery. Like what? A dandy And trying to get involved in any research projects that are going on. Um, also trying to shadow, uh, doctors, um, in the field of neurosurgery to contact them, uh, apply the any placements that they are offering and just try to Even if it's an observer ship, it doesn't really matter, because, uh, you can still reflect upon those experiences and decide whether you'd like to go to the neurosurgery. It helps you make an important decision. So neurosurgery is a more academic specialty than most others. So neuro surgeons will be involved in research for the majority for a lot of the time. Um, this is mainly because so let's always known about the brain and how it functions. Therefore, neurosurgeon, really still in its early stages, and the knowledge base is rapidly expanding, given all the research that's happening in the field. So you need to show that you're academically oriented and you can balance both clinical medicine and academic medicine as well. So you need to have a good balanced interest in both areas. Uh, finally try to show that you have you've tried to work on surgical skills or any X territory skills because obviously any surgical specialty is quite hands on. You need to show that you're interested or you that you enjoy working with your hands. Uh, plenty of societies actually post, um, sessions where you can practice your, uh, surgical skills. Suturing skills. Okay. So realistic forms of research that medical students should get into. She should aim to get involved in, um, really anything where the data or information is already out there, and you simply just summarize it into a single publication. Um, obviously, they include systematic reviews, literature reviews, meta analyses, um, and audits and letters to the edit er as well. Uh, um, publications that you should be able to get in your time in medical school. Um, the primary research and research trials are highly unlikely to get onto as they need previous experience which medical students are unlikely to have. But once you have enough experience, be on the lookout, as these are very rewarding to have on your CB. Um, So for example, um, if you if you'd like to publish any form of secondary research which generally easier to do, um, then one way you could do this is by reaching out of professors that express your express your pash in or the the order of research and ask if you could shadow any PhD students in the lab. Then you can ask if you could help with data analysis. Um, which there will often be plenty of. Um, after doing this, you could look for abstract conferences. I mean, any any competitions which are accepting abstract submissions. Um, they're always happening there. Quite common. Uh, so look out for one and suggest that you enter any work that you've been doing. You can write up a short abstract, which you can submit to it. So, out of that, you'll be able to get quick abstracts admission, and that's very useful for your put portfolio. And when you're applying for, um, the Economic Foundation program. So you should try to do enough data analysis or make a sufficient contribution to be a named author on any papers so you can start sort of slowly work your way into the research group by doing, uh, incrementally more and more work. Yeah, and just get on the good start of the professors and the team members. So how does it get publications? Um, excluding letters to the editors. So I'm talking about proper, proper publications here. So the one way is email potential supervisors, uh, whose research you're interested in, or you simply want to publish something in their field of interest. Many do come back and ask about your experience. Some reason for wanting to undertake research. They may have ongoing projects you can join, or they'll just give you a topic from scratch. I mean, feel free to propose something as it shows that you've taken the initiative to do some background reading and that you're interested in the area. The other way is to apply competitively for research projects. For example, young academics, um, or groups which put you in touch with supervisors, um, and get you into a research project are quite useful. Um, so competitions that hosted by them are quite useful. Uh, so success really almost so only depends on your previous experience, which, um, that is suitable for the role and less on the quality of your written answers and the application. So these sort of opportunities are really if you already have some prior experience in research because they can be quite competitive. So ideally, try to get some research by research experience by emailing supervisors beforehand. And then even if you're currently working on a research project, even or you can always say that you have experience in working on research, you don't necessarily already have to have multiple publications out there. And then lastly, medical societies, um, are involved in research again, like what? Dandy. Um, we have ongoing projects with supervisors in place uh, getting on to a society. It's committee can give you plenty of opportunities in research and teaching, so apply for these positions whenever you get the chance. The Prison Common Contacting supervisors Uh, firstly, there's more autonomy and influence over the project title as you can pick your supervisor, uh, and also discuss with them what you wish to do. There's less competition, So if one supervisor didn't reply, you can always ask countless others, so it's easier to start a project. There's more freedom to include other people on the project to help out, like friends, to make the process more enjoyable. It's They're usually very slow moving, as the relationship with the supervisor tends to be relaxed. And there aren't any real deadlines because you can be flexible with working hours by setting expectations. Uh, because obviously the medicine, of course, takes priority, and you can make this claim to your supervisor. Uh, when you do start, uh, finally, all progress really depends on your initiative to complete the work and ask questions. Uh, when you don't understand something, always make sure you ask and clarify any doubts that you have because no one's there to check up on you. Uh, most projects just get forgotten about because the gaps between the meeting meetings with the supervisor become too big. So the pros and cons of, uh, competitive applications? Um, they're obviously more formal, and they're likely to have deadlines, Uh, because the project is already organized and supervisor respect in place. So they obviously interested to get a publication, and they'll have expectations of the quality of your work, how many hours you put them in, and they'll make that clear in the application process. So you you already have a set project with specific roles. Obviously, it's maybe difficult some people, but it means that work will get completed regularly, and therefore, publication is more likely. Uh, and as I mentioned before, you'll get these if you have the relevant experience. Um, so best to apply for these in later years. Uh, once you've had at least some experience on working from any research projects and other said, please don't have to be, um, confirmed publications or pub med in next publications. So the process of how to effectively contact supervisors get them on board, I'll take you through this now, uh, the supervisors, you email must have a good number of publications more than 40 in a promising amount. Uh, and they also must be well established in the field. It should be active in research and academia. Um, uh, you can do You can check this by seeing when they're most recent publication was, If it's within the last year, it's a good sign. Bank your ideal supervisors and send emails to the most preferred ones first, Um, this doesn't have to be an extensive list. Just be your top two. You creates a template, you know, which you can send to all the potential supervisors. If you can try contacting people you've met before, both formally or informally, because you obviously have greater chances of getting a reply from going back to the template. You know, you obviously don't want to be writing individual emails to one of the supervisors, so just create a single email, which you think, um, change the names of addressed, too. Uh, so some supervisors will not reply, obviously, and there's no point waiting on one person to get back. Um, sorry for 30 years. So there's no point in Wain anyone waiting on anyone to get back. Just send multiple emails at once. Uh, a good ideas. Send the emails in batches at five at most and then wait around five working days and then send the next batch. If you send too many. Obviously, you may end up in a position where you have too many project options, but at the same time, don't be afraid to start more than one project at once. It increases your chances of getting the publication. Uh, some products may be a dead end. Uh, they're generally very slow moving as I mentioned, so having eggs in multiple baskets is a good idea. You are. Your own judgment comes to how many reset products you can take on because you know your work ethic best and the amount of time that you have to dedicate to other things. Um, so ensuring the email that you emphasize your public eight. I'm sorry. You're passionate and, uh, work ethic and any relevant experiences to the research. Um, at the end, you can offer to send the detailed CB if they're interested, and then when you have a better idea of the project, you can tailor the CD to the project. Uh, and say What skills are permanent? Um, or you can obviously just send this even your very first email. So how can you create competitive application? Um, so this is for the societies that are offering, um, opportunities to get onto set research projects like young young academics. For example. You can describe any relevant experience, precisely. Firstly, uh, this could include previous publications. Any writing experience? Um, for example, the extended project qualification, Um, which many of you might have done back in school teaching experience, work placements and labs or internships. Specific skills like programming languages and anything you think may be relevant. State the skills that you've gained from these, for example, speaking and listening skills from a teaching experience. Um, and make sure that you portray to bounce of both soft and hard skills, but put slightly more emphasis on the harder skills, the hard skills, because this is what the selector is looking for at the end of the day. Uh, so this would be like programming languages. Those sorts of things, uh, link this skill to the role that you're applying for and how is it relevant? State how it's relevant and how the skills help you excel in the role and make a valuable contribution. So repeat this structure for every single experience. And make sure you always emphasize that passion for the subject as well as your work ethic. How do you propose your own research to supervisors? It's obviously important to have some background knowledge on the topic projects and attempting to form research questions. Start by referring to review articles about the topic. Uh, these can be found with a simple Google search. Obviously, um, ensure to read the introduction section of the reviews, which will help set the scene in that particular field of research. Um, obviously, with both of the most recent publications and literature reviews, Um, but if you need more core scientific knowledge and it's probably best to use textbooks or reliable medical websites, then I would highly recommend reading the conclusion or abstract sections, especially of literature reviews. Uh, to understand what further work is needed in the field because literature reviews and systematic reviews tend to identify gaps in the area of research, so knowing them can be quite useful, and it and you could impress your supervisor. Um, so once the background information is reinforced. Think about its application patient's. This would be in related to the drug therapy quality of care and so on and so forth. So the pike oh, format, um, is a structured way of coming up with a clinical research question that's more patient oriented. But at the same time, you could still use it for research questions in general, because at the end of the day, all research is done. Um, in order to help patients' in some way or another, uh, so firstly, uh, patient population of problem. Think about what the demographics of the patient's or population are. You should also think about what the disease or the condition is that you hope to address or what other problems associated with, uh, current practices in managing the disease. So and then I the intervention. How would you intervene in the patient population? What drug therapy or lifestyle change, or even screening, test or process? Will you have them undergo What intervention will help you fill in the current gaps in research? See, what are the alternative management strategies, a different surgery or a different drug, so you could compare and contrast all the different options maybe even an alternative diagnostic test or compare your current approach to treating the disease with the procedure. Uh, maybe, uh, a conditional problem doesn't need anything at all. So you might want to think about how you can argue that. Finally, Outcomes. What might the outcomes be? It could include whether or not there is a cure or how you can make effective diagnoses. Um, the outcome of whether about what the financial cost is, uh, how the intervention affects the quality of life, the side effects, morbidities and complications, et cetera. So it's crucial to decide the optimal method of measuring, uh, the outcome and how to obtain the most information possible with the least bias and the highest validity. Uh, so, for example, um, quality of life Patient's is best assessed using problems. Patient reported outcome measures. And these have been quite commonly used, especially in recent years, um, to assess the efficacy of particular intervention in patient's by looking at the patient's perspective of them. Uh, because obviously, at the end of the day, the treatment is for the patient and therefore, uh, the opinion that you should be getting most value to is the patient's subsections of a research paper and their purpose, the abstract is just a summary of the entire paperwork study. Uh, it gives background to the subject a reason why the project was conducted. Uh, it brief outlines the methodology methodology of the study. So how it was carried out and breathe the outlines, the results. The state's the conclusion. Uh, the introduction provides a lot of background information to the subject to help the reader understand the rest of the paper. Uh, it outlines the purpose of the paper that justifies its necessity. Uh, by giving a brief history of the field. It's progress over time, and it's current state. It's really only necessary to read the section if you're completely new to the topic and want a better understanding. And it's usually only the last couple of paragraphs that are actually about the paper or topic. So if you're confident with the content or the background information, skip to the end of the introduction and then that will be more pertinent to the topic of the paper. Look for headings and subheadings in the main bulk of the paper. Help you find information that you're looking for. Uh, this would be different in the paper, so it's difficult to be specific about the title's that will be used. The method section is very useful for understanding how the study was conducted, uh, both on a large scale. Like, for example, recruiting patient's, um, the inclusion or exclusion criteria that they used, um, down to the laboratory techniques. Uh, used, um, So, yeah, this section is mainly used for critical appraisal of the work or evaluation of a bias is, um, and evaluate evaluation of the methodology used. This needs, like a good understanding of Well, I guess you need some practice beforehand critically appraising papers and understanding what methodology is best to use in what type of research study. So, um, I guess reading plenty of papers beforehand and just trying to get a feel for what methods are necessary for what kinds of research? Tums. Oh, sorry. I accidentally stopped screen sharing. I just got back back home now. That would be Yeah. Thanks. Just a second. Three. You should be able to see the main screen now. Okay, um, sections to read through for efficient data extraction. Um, you'll really have to read an entire paper if you know where to find the information that you need. Uh, as I previously mentioned, the functions of each other sections of the research papers, uh, obviously must read the abstract inclusion because they contain the most, uh, condensed and important information that, um and it just sets to see, uh, or the rest of the paper. Um, it's recommended to read the results section so you can get a more in depth understanding of how they arrived at the conclusion, Um, in the paper, Um and also just so that you could, I guess, retain some of the statistics that they've mentioned. Um, it's also useful to get an understanding of the P value sample sizes and confidence intervals and different statistical techniques. Uh, you can easily do this by, um applying for specific courses on force error, for example, on code academy, which go through all of these statistical techniques and how you can implement using programming languages. So I'd highly recommend getting a good grasp of, uh, statistics because it's so commonly used across pretty much all research. Um, so when performing data extraction for a systematic review, you need to read the papers to understand them fully. But this is only when you shortlisted one of the main papers that you'll be analyzing for extracting data from this will usually be in the range of like 25 to 40 maximum. So it shouldn't be too many papers or one systematic review. Obviously, this will help you comment in particular. Praise them appropriately. Where to publish General impact factor. Um, so impact factor is considered the measure of the journals, prestige and importance in this respective field. The formula that are trained here. Uh, yeah, but X by y it just gives you a number of representing the cited work from that journal during a particular year. The higher the impact factor. Higher Impact factor journals will have a more stringent approval process, um, resulting in greater likelihood of rejection and longer times to publication. Predatory journals, on the other hand, publish anything you submit for a fee without a pair of process or any editing. Uh, these are obviously fraudulent journals, which must be avoided. Uh, aiming for the highest impact factor isn't really a priority. The medical students, because obtaining the publication obtaining a publication in a pub MED Index journal is what counts towards the foundation program. Um, but if you're going to academia, the higher impact factor journals obviously do sway the decisions of selective when you're applying for the AFP or MD PhD or reticulated degrees. So it is useful to publish in five impact active journals. Um, the that many, I guess, summarizes the slide science citation index. Um, it's a database of, uh, 9200 notable and significant scientific journals across 100 78 disciplines. This is, uh, quite frequently changing. So both the disciplines and family journals are included in this database, um, now owned by Carafate. And I guess the most useful features are that you can search for specific journals, Um, it's metrics or the characteristic data, um, the number of citations, the papers and several other bits of information. Um, and it also offers cited reference searching, which allows you to track the entire network of citations for specific papers and follow the only of ideas. So, for example, let's say you're doing a research project and you're reading the literature Review where you come across a specific idea. Um, and they've sighted another literature review. Let's say so. You ideally want to be able to cite the original primary publication from which this idea arose. So in order to trace that back, you can use, uh, the science citation index, Um, which basically takes you back to the primary research article. That's definitely a useful feature that this does. And, most importantly, don't give up. You almost certainly face difficulty in finding a supervisor or writing the publication, um, or, you know, getting rejected by a journal. So on and so forth as a medical student who's new to research. And this is bound to happen. Always ensure that your feedback following each rejection or failure and most of the time, journalists do provide, um, feedback and give you a second chance to obviously submit. So, um yeah, don't give up. I guess that's the most important message. Thank you so much for watching, um, if you again. If you have any questions, please feel free to tell me. Um, thanks again. Yes,