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OK. Hello everyone. I'm Alicia. I'm one of the members of NMR events team. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Um Just apologies for what happened um last week and hopefully everything uh is fine for today. So as a bit of an introduction to an Mra itself, so what N Mra is is that it's in nonprofit organization, founded uh founded in 2022 to help promote the sorry to help promote um um research among medical students as well as young clinicians and um giving opportunities to help um people put in their skills for research as well as conducting your own research as well. And today our event is all about abstracts and conferences. And for our first speaker of today is Rene Asim. She is a final year medical student at Saint George's Medical School and a research director at student Medit London. So a bit about youth me is that its aims to coordinate and rest toute uh sorry and coordinate and rest redistribute access medical supplies to individuals and communities and places in need by organizing projects that link prospective donating organizations. We received the organizations and NARE herself is quite passionate about increasing the accessibility of for medical students in research and having over 30 research presentations and publications herself. She has also won 10 prizes in the steam platform such as R CS for her work. I think I'm gonna hand over the floor to NARE now. Yeah, sounds good. Hello everybody. Thank you for taking out the time to join us this evening. Um My name is N I'm finally a medical student. I'm just really glad to be here. Thank you to M Mra for having me. Um Hopefully this evening is going to be pretty chill. I understand that sometimes scientific abstracts can be overwhelming and nerve wracking to write down, but it's OK, we're just going to walk through it together. Um I've also got a few couple of examples on the slides as well. Um I'm hoping this is a relaxed session. So if you've got any questions, please feel free to chat in to chat or um flag it up. It would be really nice to hear what you're thinking. I just want this to be a good session where we can learn from each other as well. So how to write a scientific abstract, I think firstly and foremostly, it's important to understand what is an abstract. So I think the abs an abstract as a snapshot, this snapshot provides you an overview about the purpose of your study in question the methods, you employed the results and some important conclusions. You made at the end, it is, I think important to understand that this is your study and something to be proud about. It's an abstract allows you to make your study shine and be acknowledged by others. So I feel like, and I know this sounds cringy. But when you start writing an abstract, it's a lot to do with your mindset as well. Tell yourself that this is something you are proud about. Write it with pride. If you are writing it for a conference or if you're writing it for a prize, or if you're even writing it for a publication, I think the first important thing is just having that mindset that it will be accepted, it will be uh it will be um something commended upon you would, you would be surprised how determined and how well you can write it once you put your mind to it. So that's why I always say like have pride in it. You want the reader to be convinced, you want them to understand that what your study is doing is of value and is of importance. So really take your time in structuring it as well, right? So we talked about what an abstract is and I think a key point is mindset. So before writing, tell yourself that this is going to be a good one. So um where to start writing abstracts? I think um in medical school, the best place to start or think about writing abstract for, are your SSE S now your SSE S could be things like AQ IP project or an audit you've undertaken usually around your second or third year of medical school. It can also be just a literature review as well. Um These are good places when give you that first insight into research and it's always worth even if you're a final year. Like me, look back at your previous SSE S see if you can write uh abstract about it. I feel like you've put in the effort for it. Don't let it go to waste. Think about where you can present and what you can do with it. So your SSE S are a great place to begin with. Audits, Q I PS literature reviews. If anything you've done, think about making it into an abstract and presenting it. I think another great place which a lot of people don't think about is the idea about medical education, abstracts and teaching abstracts. I think this is where I personally got started with my research journey. I'm very passionate about medical education, making it accessible for all. And even if you're like, OK, audits Q I PS are a little bit overwhelming for me to begin with. I am a strong believer, you can start off your journey by just a simple medical education one. So what do I mean by this? I mean, simply just making an abstract on a teaching session you did. So let's give you guys an example. Um One of the a one, a lovely student I've been mentoring. She's in um year two of medical school right now. And she just held this, held a session on teaching cranial nerves to the upcoming year, one medical students. So a session about your cranial nerves, your cranial ne anatomy. And then she got everyone practicing the cranial nerve exam. So very straightforward to do. The only thing you then need to do is making a questionnaire. So a prequestionnaire before the session and a post questionnaire after the session. So I'll show you guys some examples. Your prequestionnaire could have things like demographics. So you can ask about um where they've um who are they, where they've come from, you can measure things like changes in confidence or changes in understanding before the session and after the session as well. Um You could do it on Likert scales and go from there. That's such a straightforward way to begin and present it on to places like JME, places like a OM E and so forth. Um I thought I would also hopefully you guys can see this show you an example as well. So one of my earlier abstracts was these teaching session I did for my masters. So you can see I called it like ay boot camp and I presented in, in the A OM E conference in Switzerland the other day. So if you have a look, it was a simple teaching session, right? So I asked about the demographics. That's a good way to get started. Then I asked about confidence in Aussies. I asked about teaching in Ay, I asked about the idea whether teaching can be well done online or on site. Think about these interesting things, you can test and measure something that will make you stand out as well. And then, so this was a more of a prequestionnaire. So I want you guys to notice then in another questionnaire on my post questionnaire, you can see I talked about compared to before, right? So I want to measure a change. How did these sessions make me feel before the sessions and after the sessions? Like what was the change in confidence as well? So you can see like I quite my p main purpose with these teaching sessions, I did was more like quick bite size videos and that's what I discussed in the conference as well. So you can measure so many of these little bits and bobs with medical education abstracts. I hope this has been useful to just give you an insight on things to do even if you're a little bit overwhelmed. And like, OK, she's saying a lot of information to me actually, a simple, how confident did you feel before this teaching session? How confident did you feel after this teaching session? Two questions. How has this improved? Your uh sorry, what was your understanding of this teaching session before. And what was the understanding of the topic this teaching session does after? So you're measuring confidence and understanding for things and that's your, um that's your feedback form. Something I hear a lot about also is the worry about ethics with studies like these, I just like to refer to the NHS research ethics tool. Um This is great if you just open up this ethics tool and write a little bit about your session, it tells you whether you need ethical approval or not, usually ethical approval is not really needed for these simple survey based sessions. So take it as you may, I feel like it's still a great place to get started. But if you're very much stressed about ethics, I always put a statement at the end being like I referred to the Ethics committee review to which said that the session did not require approval and there's that as well. Lovely. So we talked about S es we talked about how to structure a teaching abstract as well. So now let's, I think get started with what actually is an abstract. So in an abstract, the first thing you wanna think about is a title, the title. It needs to be like catchy, it needs to get the reader's attention. But at the same time, accurately convey what you're trying to prove or what's been going on, then you've got your introduction as well. We'll talk about this in a lot more detail later. But I just want you guys to be, feel comfortable with the parts, the introduction sets the context and then you tell the problem, you tell whether there was a gap in literature somewhere. And what are you then aiming to do from this? So if we look back to my teaching session on sys, so what I had read from literature I had seen, OK. Um There Aussies are tall in a very traditional way um where there are long teaching sessions and people and students feel very overwhelmed with it. So what I'll do is for my teaching session, I'm going to test out a session where I teach everything they need to know in 20 to 30 minutes and see if that changes understanding and confidence. So I read the literature. I found a gap there and then I designed my teaching session on this gap. I measured confidence, I measured understanding. So we talked about the title, we talked about the introduction, we talked about the aims as well. Other bits to think about are your methods. So give a good overview of the research methodology. So talk to them about um how did you do this research? How did you measure data? Uh Sorry, how was data collected? What techniques did you use? What procedures did you use and so forth? So, so if I take the example of my same session, my I would say something like I held six teaching sessions. They were done online. I sent the post and prefeedback forms by email, the post and prefeedback forms had this question and then a little line at the end being like I referred to this tool which stated that the study needs no ethical approval. Then we go to results in results. You present your key findings. So you can use things like pie charts, you can use things like line graphs or bar charts as well. And these are great because then they tell you some important findings of your session. And lastly, you can end up with a discussion or a conclusion. I like the discussion or a conclusion to be a place where I can reflect upon whether I met the aims previously. So it's good to have a read and see whether your study actually met those aims and mention it in the conclusion section, right? So let's go to this in a little bit more detail. So with title, I think before writing an abstract have in mind what conference you would like to apply to. So let's say, for example, uh I would like to apply to the aci annual conference which happened in 2023. I cannot stress more than enough that act, read the conference, read what they're doing, read what the conference wants. So what I did, I like to do is I like to highlight some key words. So I've made up my mind, I would like to apply to the A a conference. I will highlight the keywords of surgical surgical training. They're looking for things like updates and clinical practice and so forth. So in my mind, I'm like whatever abstract I'm submitting here, I would like the title to maybe have key terms that are relevant to these themes right here. It's good to be specific. You would want to avoid very vague language as well. Um That's pretty much it. So to give you guys another example, one of the abstracts I submitted to the aid conference was some teaching sessions we did at Saint George's on uh entering medical school. So we did these sessions for widening participation, students coming into medical school. We taught them about the application process. We did mock interviews with them. We helped them practice the U CAT. And in our mind, we thought of this as if we want to make a diverse surgical team, we would need the medical school application process to be more inclusive and invite people from all backgrounds inside who would ultimately become a surgeon. So that was like a whistle stop tour of the study. So when I was making an abstract for it, my mind was OK. I want my title to have something in there that mimics what the conference needs. So the conference needs stuff about surgical training. What I will do is in my, in my title, I will put surgical training in there as well. I know it's small but it really captures whoever is going to be reviewing your abstract, that you've read the themes, what you're presenting is relevant. OK. Um Next couple of things is your introduction. Now, in your introduction, we said that it's really good to provide a background about what's your study is addressing? What are some gaps in the literature? What is the problem? You don't have to keep it long. An abstract is barely what 300 words in most places pick the most relevant and key studies. So everyone keep worries and things you have to do in a very extensive search strategy on MEDLINE or Ovid or Scopus. And that's really not the case. Sometimes with abstracts, you can, what I personally like to do is let's say, II just go on to Google scholar, right? And if you go to Google scholar, you can simply type in some keywords, what your study is addressing and see what comes up. So let's say, for example, we're still talking about this study. If you guys remember, we talked about what we did was we held some teaching sessions supporting widening participation students into medical school with the goal that these students will one day join the surgical workforce as well and diversify it, we need these grassroots initiatives to ultimately diversify the NHS workforce. So I can simply just type in things like diversity, surgery, NHS medical education and see what comes up, right? And you can literally just read so much about it. You can see things like this little study right there saying that there's a problem in gender diversity in UK surgical specialities. You can, you can see this one about a snapshot of equality and diversity among UK vascular surgery trainings and go from there like your background or my background. In this case, would then focus on how important it is for the surgical workforce to be more diverse because it is these this diverse workforce that can provide good care for minority communities. Therefore, initiative like mine. So I addressed the problem and now I'm linking it to what I did. So initiatives like mine are going to support a wide range of students to enter medical school. And so hopefully at a very grassroots level, try to tackle this issue. So it doesn't really need to be extensive. Like if you can go on MEDLINE PUBMED or database, that's fantastic. But a simple like go looking over Google scholar or typing in some keywords and looking over PUBMED as well. Picking at least 1 to 2 studies, makes such a difference. So OK, we've talked about the introduction, I think then it's important to think about your aims. So your aims don't have to be very, very long. Um You can have a couple, but I think my main thing would be to always specify what you intend to achieve. Don't be vague about it or anything. So for example, if I take this study, um I as one person cannot diversify the surgical workforce alone. So it'll, I don't think it would be fair or accurate for me to have that as an aim, but maybe an aim like increase accessibility to medical school through these sessions could be one. So think about some realistic specific aims. What do you intend to achieve? What do you in, what are you going to do and align them with the problem or gap identified? So here's what, here's a little snapshot of my abstract. I did just to show you guys. So we started off with this title which we talked about needs to link to the conference. Then we talked about the introduction and background. So you can see my introduction and background. Isn't that long? That's all I just picked out some key studies linking the highlighting the problem. So I talked about how surgical leadership is not very diverse. I talked about 12% of total medical applicants are ba am E which is quite concerning. I talked about that this underrepresentation happens before they even go and pick up course surgical training as well. I talked about how the Royal College has done studies saying that this stems from unique barriers to medical school admissions. So not that long at all, I remember for this one, I just looked over Google scholar in PUBMED, picked out some key studies and then put it there and then with aims, just a specific aim on what we will achieve or what we tend to do. So I just gave a little sentence. We know we're not gonna diversify the whole surgical workforce, but we can, it's a very specific aim. We will be able to support aspiring widening participation, students by the establishment of our zone in our society at Saint George's. So um the next thing you go on to is your method. So your method would provide an overview of what your research was and what you did, we talked about before how to structure it. So start off by saying, well, how are you going to collect data? What did you actually do? Um How did you send this data along? Um What did your feedback forms in this case contain as well? Um My, one of my supervisors said that your methods should be so specific that if somebody wants to replicate it, they can so take that as you may but think about making them specific enough. So somebody like me who's not read your study, but yet I could do this. Um Lastly, you come up to results. So results I would say is probably one of the most important. It's picking key findings of your research. You don't have to present everything in your abstract. It's just a couple of hun a couple of 100 of words, it's really good just to pick and choose what you would like to do. So good things I'd like to pick up are things like percentage changes, percentage increase, percentage, decrease some key findings there. I think that is my main goal. I would like you to pick up the idea to focus just on the most impactful and relevant results. So I just wanted to show you like, what do I mean? Now this was a presentation we did at a conference about our um widening participation sessions. So you can see here here and here these are all our results you get me like this is what we actually presented. So you can see there's quite a few there. But in reality, this is what we put in the abstract. I did. If I put all of the stuff I got in the Wilcoxon sign rank test or percentage increase or decrease and so forth, my abstract would be, you know, like 500 words long, I just picked what's the most important. So I said something along the lines of the multiple mini interview webinar, our session did displayed a mean increase in understanding. So do you guys see like I picked out the percentage increase with depth? Then I thought this was very interesting. I saw that 57% of students found our WP zone having more, providing more support than individual school resources. And then the in person sessions we did displayed a 50% increase in students feeling more prepared. So once again, like I just want you guys to take two seconds and look back at this. We had so many results. We measured so much but our abstract just had a couple of lines. It's so important. You just pick out this key findings like we spoke about in the meaning mindset is key. You want to convince the conference that your study is important. Pick out the best things, pick out things that will make people say, oh my goodness, this is fantastic. Pick out stuff that will make your study shine, love you stuff. And then lastly, we go on to your conclusion. Your conclusion needs to basically summarize the main findings of your research and why this is significant. Why this is important? I feel like this is probably the most important thing. Please take your time to connect it back to your objectives. So our discussion and conclusion section here mostly included stuff like yes, we understand diversifying the surgical workforce is a big thing, but it's initiatives like these that even if we help one medical student come in, it's initiatives like these that contribute slightly to the major cause or the major problem at t. Um That's pretty much it. So I just wanted to go back to the teaching abstracts bit. I know it can be overwhelming. Starting off with AQ IP and audit at on your first goal with the abstract. So that's why I always said, please try your best, have a think about doing the simple medical education. One, it doesn't have to be the most extensive thing, but a simple feedback form would make a big deal. So it's literally all you have to measure is just things like confidence and understanding. How confident do you feel? Answering questions approaching this topic before the session and after the session, please rate it on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 7 lier scale. How would you rate your understanding with X XX topic before and after the session, please rate it on the like a scale as well. It's two elements you need to measure and you can create your own little teaching abstract and your teaching study if you want to go in conferences, but you're not quite sure how to start. And I hope that the feedback form I showed them makes sense. But if you feel like I would like to see some more feedback forms, I will if you would email me afterwards, I'm very happy to send you some other examples, right? Um General tips is just making sure once again that your language is very clear and very concise in your abstract and make sure that you adhere to specific guidelines as well. So read exactly what the conference wants. Do they want specific headings? How many words do they want as well? I always also say this that use your friends, use your connections around to read it, give you feedback. The first one is always the most challenging, but I promise you it becomes easier as you go with time. The only way you will grow if you push yourself to be uncomfortable. Lovely. Um I hope that was useful. I apologize. It, it was uh it was quite a bit of stuff to take in. Um I'd be very grateful if you wouldn't mind filling in a feedback form. And I think having you guys filled that out, hopefully, this feedback form also inspires you on how to format your session. Um and how to format questions there. If you've got any questions, if you're like, I would like to see you some mock abstract. Please email me at this. I'm very happy to send you some copies of my abstracts over to have a read. I know it wasn't part of the session. But if you are struggling with things like um designing posters, I've also got some poster templates. I'm very happy to send your way. So please, please, please. I would be most grateful if you can fill in the feedback form. But if you've got any questions or if hopefully this has motivated you slightly, then please do email me. I'm super happy to help. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Irene. That was really clear and insightful. A presentation on how to write abstracts. Um Does anyone have any questions on Irene? No, I think there's a question in a group chat is graphs like Histogram pie chart used in an abstract, not really, it's just simply going to be um a percentage change um or a percentage increase in confidence or decrease in confidence, a percentage decrease or increase in understanding. Um It could also be just a key finding you've seen usually histograms, line graphs and stuff are used in your posters just to add on to that sometimes for conferences where if you go to a conference and your work has been accepted for a poster oral presentation. The the abstract may be retrospectively published in a journal. And at that point, some key figure from your submission, you know, you can optionally add that in. So you might be able to put like uh forest plot for me analysis or maybe a key like a captain my for a trial. It's like one key figure basically. So it's not common but you do sometimes see it especially for high profile work that has been accepted at a large conference. Yeah, lovely stuff. Thank you very much guys over 50 projects himself. Um Your the floor is yours. Hi, thanks so much for that, Alicia. Um Let me just get some screen slides up. I OK. All good. Um Yes, we can see it. Cool, right? So um Irene has kind of very, very well covered the stuff about creating your abstract. She's gone through a lot of detail about ideation of a a potential project and how to present your abstract in terms of structuring it, what you might want to include and all of that. So I'm not going to dwell too much about that. I want to talk more about the other side of it, which is now that you've got an abstract. What do you do with it? Where does it end up? What are some tips and tricks to actually present at conferences or take your work to that next stage when it comes to dissemination. So to start off with just very, very briefly, um the main reason we make abstracts and we want to present our work at a conference is is because there's an inherent benefit of networking and essentially advertising our work to other people, both in the context of people who want to know about your work and their results. So if you're doing like a medical education thing like NARE or saying you want universities and teachers to hear about it so that they can copy what you did and improve on their practice and implement better mechanisms. So it's important to convey your results to your peers and people who will use it. But it's also important to essentially work with people and collaborate with them. So you might, you know, someone might listen to your presentation and say, well, this was really good, but you were wrong about Xy and Z. So here's a way to improve it or they might say, well, we're doing something very similar. We'd like to work with you. And so an impactful presentation opens you up to feedback, it opens you up to opportunities and it creates a space where people can learn from each other. So it's about kind of communicating effectively. And in order to do that, we need to understand where exactly we are going to do it and what that will look like. So these are kind of just basics that I think would like to add on to what has already said, you know, you have to be clear and concise word limits. Um They will typically be 200 to 300 words. I've seen some as high as 400 but they're very rare. So do follow that extensively, you know, be sure to highlight key findings and to use, you know, efficient language. Um One thing that people often get wrong with abstracts is kind of using jargon and using um abbreviations you in the same way that you have to use and abbreviate it in the first time in your manuscript here. It's also the same thing you have to write it in full. And then the second time you can use an abbreviation um structure with logical flow. And I mean, already given the structures of your background methods, results conclusions that's very standard. It's not required in all conferences, but a vast majority of them including our one in next month, we will expect you as well to present in, in a in that same format. We want to see that you've structured each component of your abstract to convey it as efficiently as possible. Um to include a statement of your research question, some obligations will expect you to explicitly write this, the the objective of this study was whatever. And in some of them, you integrate that into your background. So the main thing is just being cautious of providing a clear understanding of what your study does and why it needs to exist. I think the in my, in the systematic review series and when I did the, when we did the lecture on I ideation, how to come up with a research project, I used the analogy of essentially acting as if you at every step, ask yourself why you're doing it and that really gets you to the the core of why exactly a project must exist and what benefit it offers to people because you keep asking us well, why did I write this? Why did I do that? Why did I collect this information? Why am I presenting the data and the way I am? And if you have a justification for everything, you can be confident, it's gonna be valuable. But uh I won't dwell on this too much. I'm happy to take questions at the end, but we can come back to this and abstract writing is more nare than me for today. But uh yeah, so things that people get wrong um including a lot of random background information. It really doesn't matter. Um Most good abstracts probably have like two sentences on background information. It's just purely context tails straight. Why your work needs to exist? That's it. You might will talk about clinical guidelines, you might talk about previous work and the, the gaps they they leave behind for you. And that's essentially all you need to say. I already covered drug and acronyms failing to state research significance. This is a tough one because it's very easy for people to say there was a 10% improvement on this drug compared to placebo. But what does that really mean? 10% doesn't sound like a lot unless you understand the context of, well, that might save 1000 lives over a year of giving it to people or whatever it may be. You know, the context and the significance of your research is what's really gonna get you out there because you are attending a conference with the sole purpose of getting feedback and collaboration and d disseminating your work. If you're unable to share people why they should care about your work, you haven't really achieved the purpose of attending in the first place. So it seems very logical to be able to adequately describe why your work needs attention. And then, yeah, the next thing on my mind is obviously proofreading, you know, a lot of abstracts get flagged up because they have typos or misspelled things, grammar errors results that don't make sense because the percentage don't have to add up to 100 whatever it may be, those things will make your abstract not look as strong as it should and they're pretty easy to correct. Which is why I said best practice is to see peer review before submission because sometimes there are just things that are wrong with your paper that you won't realize because you've looked at it for so long or because you don't have the requisite experience. No, that's not appropriate. It's good to have a fresh pair of eyes. But uh yeah, again, we can come back to if there's any other questions or anything that's on people's mind. Um So the next thing I want to talk about is and I'll do this again for um presentations and, and posters as well. But we need to talk about how they're actually judged. Like how when you go to a conference and you're trying to win an award, what exactly are they looking for? And for me, the three things that they really look for are listed here. Originality, merit relevance. So, um there will these, these, these all kind of interlink, it's hard to have an original paper that doesn't have relevance because if it's an regional idea that's impactful, it should be relevant. And in the in line with current knowledge anyway, similarly with merit, if your idea is conducted well, and it's got a really good resolve that speaks for itself, it's unlikely to not be original or relevant. So they, they do have a lot of overlap, but it's very important to remember that these are things that you'll be explicitly judged on and you will receive credit for doing those. Well, um you know, even for our conference, I had, you know, we've just now finalized a, a script of essentially how we're gonna grade everyone's abstract. So we've done this ourselves and there are a lot any, any reputable conference you attend will have some kind of performer they follow for the markers. So this is just an example. I found one on the internet. Um you know, as you can see, they, they judge you based on how relevant are you to the theme of the value of informatics across the healthcare continuum. Um For anyone who doesn't know informatics is basically using big data to analyze and answer research questions. Then they've said, well, did you state the problem clearly and identified the gap? That's what we said here. You know, you got to have your research question laid out and you need to structure it appropriately. Um So, and then next thing is like I said, did you follow a rigorous method? Did you have a clear statement of what you found how it ties back to your, the best ones? They tie it back always to the results and to the problem, you know, it's not like I said, it's not good enough to say, oh, our drug was 10% better than placebo. You've got to then say, well, what does that mean? Does that mean that now we should start prescribing this drug to everybody? Does that mean that, you know, how many lives has that changed? How many people do we need to give this to? Does it mean it's safe? There are all these other questions. So that's very important. And the last one is very subjective contribution to normal practice is, is challenging to interpret. But it, it's the same thing about originality. It's this concept of how do we, does your work actually, if it didn't exist or when it does exist, what's the difference? Right? That's how I always interpret it when we've marked abstract before. So, and the way I always judge it is essentially by looking at what current literature exists out there. And if they, if the study that I'm looking at doesn't answer a research question that isn't already answered, I'm not gonna give it our points of originality because I could just read the other paper that's already published and not learn anything from this one. So, you know, this is, you know, we've, we've rejected a lot of manuscripts like this because they sent in a meta analysis or a cohort study. But there are already two or three others that have been recently done that answer the same question. And at that point, the novelty is not enough to justify another study on that thing. So it, it's, it, it, it's questionable to, to accept it and to give it high scores on originality. But uh yeah, so you can obviously this will be recorded. So you can obviously take a look at this later and I'm happy to talk you through this further if any of you want to submit or want some guidance on how to make sure that you, you're taking off all these requirements. But this is keep this in the back of your mind whenever you're writing something down. Um But yeah, once we finish with abstracts, the next thing is, well, you go to the conference and you can present your work there. So how that will look like essentially is you either present a poster like these guys, they're all kind of standing in front of their work and they will spend maybe an hour out of the whole conference standing there and people will approach them and like these people are here, you know, they'll kind of talk about, well, this is what I did. This is the key result and this is what I think would be next steps for research and for changing our knowledge in, in research as a result of that. So the attendees get to listen along, but also judges will kind of pitch in and listen to you present about your work and listen to you the way you answer your questions. And they'll reward you marks accordingly. Same thing with all the presentations. But except this time, your audience sits down in a lecture hall or something and will listen to you for 10 minutes and then take maybe five q, five minutes of questions, for example. So it, it, they're very similar in terms of presentation technique. They're just the audience and the way which you do it is slightly different. But 99% the things you say shouldn't be that different to be honest. So yeah, presenting as a poster is probably what I'll do with first, it's easier to talk about. I think um you essentially need to structure your entire paper, not just your abstract p in your entire paper into about a meter of paper. So it, you know, you you will have the top of it will become an abstract uh sorry, an introduction, then you have methods, then results, then discussion. So you know that that's, that's all you need really just put down maybe 25% of your allocated area for each, probably a bit more for methods and results. To be honest because you really, it's really beneficial here to put graphs and really go into all the details, having visuals that people can see and say, OK, I can identify from this chart that there was a 16% improvement in mortality because of the surgery that's really helpful. That's very powerful because people can see that it's going to actually add up to something and it's, it's, you don't want to be the type of person who stands in front of their poster and points to individual words. It's very boring. It's difficult to follow along with because people don't really have the ability. It's very difficult to kind of read along to tiny text and also to listen to someone at the same time, it doesn't work. So it's very much about conciseness, being informative and allowing the visual aides to speak for themselves to stand out, I think, to do that. But if you do these steps, you already stand out. But the thing that really sells it for me, the one thing that I can consistently say is gonna make you one of the best presentations there is if you can explain your work to an attendee in about 60 seconds, if you can sit there and go OK. This is what I did. This is how it's useful, this is the methodology and how strong it is and there. And then finally sum up some results and conclusions. People will actually be really captivated by that because it's, it's succinct. It's interesting and it shows the value of your work in a very immediate way. And if you can do that and you can answer all questions, you're probably one of the best people there. It really doesn't take a lot because it's when it comes to a poster, most of them have the same format. So the person stands out more than the poster does. But I will if I go to the next slide, this is what I wanna show you as well. A lot of the marks you get given are for essentially what the project is you get. So out of this scoring out of 35 you get, let's see, you get five for motivation, discussion methods and experience. And so 15 marks are essentially for what the project is 20. If you want to count the abstract, we've redone that so you can't really, you know, count that response to questions is five narration presentation is another five. You only get five marks for laying out your poster, like for following the structure and like putting graphs, you get five marks out of 35 objectively, it not that important, but it might make the difference because it's very easy. Once you've already got to the conference, you've already locked in the 20 marks, you can't change your your methodology, you've already done that. What you can change is your postal design and the way you present on the day and that's really helpful. So these marks depend on you. These marks don't depend on you as a person on the day. Mhm But I think the best abstracts and the best posters are the ones that have a clear story that is translatable into a graph or something. So it it if you really think back to when you are doing your study. It's really helpful to plan ahead and think. Well, OK, I'm collecting this data. How do I present it? So if I have, let's say a meta analysis, I know I'm gonna have a forest plot and I'm gonna have a table summarizing the patient data. I already know that's gonna go in my poster. So in my, in my head while I'm doing the work, I can already start to visualize what the methods and results will look like. That stuff, you know, really takes some, it takes some prep planning, but it makes your work a lot more concise and it really allows you to hone in on what's good because you've already thought about it weeks in advance. So if you wanna maximize your marks, you don't do it on the day, you do it three weeks before or a month before whenever you are actually conducting the work because then you can take off stuff like is this clinically relevant? Is the the project unique and unexpected, you know, is the clinical uh sorry, the the preliminary data adequate to justify the project? You could have answered those questions months in advance. It's not gonna change. You know, if there's literature out there that's relevant and you found it a month ago, it won't change in that month. So prep planning is always vital, but that's enough about posters. I don't want to dwell on them too much just in terms of time. The next thing that is on my mind is oral presentations. So I'm very, very similar in terms of the way you do it. The difference is is that instead of standing in front of three people, you're gonna do it in front of a lecture hall. So and also instead of having a poster, you're gonna have a slide show, kind of like, like I do now. So what changes is you have to really navigate the storytelling. Imagine it's kind of like set a ted talk. To be honest, you have to sit there and say, well, I've got this many slides in 10 minutes. I'm gonna say Xy and Z in this slide and then go to the next one, go to the next one and so forth. You learn to kind of navigate your story in the time you have allotted to you. And it's, it's a, it's a skill and an art to pick up, you know, stuff that's on the slides. Very rarely needs to be said again unless you're gonna expand on it. But you wanna use what's behind you as an aid to what you're gonna say and to convey the key information visually as much as possible in the same way that your poster would. So a lot of people, you know, when they present, if they have a poster or presentation, they will reuse a lot of the same graphs, a lot of the same text, they'll just put as bullet points on their slides and that's completely fine. So it's very important that you're using those slides to your advantage and you're making as much of a benefit out of your spoken time and your words as possible because you're only gonna get 1015 minutes on that stage tops and then potentially another five for questions and questions you have no good control over. You don't know what they're going to ask you. So it's very important to preplan this stuff. Q and A sections. I think they're a bit of a curveball. You have no idea what you can expect. So it's very easy to, to kind of freeze up and to, to have anxiety over them because you just don't know what a question might be and how to answer it. That's common. You know, it's not unusual to have a question from someone that you didn't expect. There are also common type of questions that people say things like, oh, what's the next steps or can you explain why you did this or why you use this methodology? That stuff is fairly easy and, you know, good planning really helps to just mitigate that, you know, you know, what exactly you can do uh uh with your study and where it's gonna go. And you can really use that as an opportunity to show that you understand why you did what you did and the strength of your study and you can really illustrate where your work is gonna go. But the, the one biggest thing that I will say is if you don't know what the answer is, try and answer it as best as you can with your knowledge. So you can say, well, I'm not fully certain about this. I've read Xy and Z or, you know, my study suggests Xy and Z, but I don't know enough to answer your question fully and I'd love to discuss it with you later or to find out for myself. You know, the best presenters don't pretend they know everything because they're not there to know everything. They're there only to present what their work is and the context of that work. If they, if they get asked something that's a curveball, they shouldn't. And if they don't know it, it won't be held against you because it wasn't part of the script, it wasn't there and being confident and being, I guess, brave enough to say, I, I'm sorry, I know Xy and Z this is part of the answer, but I don't know the full thing. It will make you stand up because a lot of, a lot of people that are confident won't admit that. And it takes its own level of humility as well, which is important because if you're going to an somewhere to network and to stand out, the strength of your character also speaks about you as a researcher. But yeah, and also if you look back to the marketing scheme. So they give you credit for how knowledgeable and conversant you are. So you actually need to have a discussion with the person um interesting in the pre presentation manner. So, you know, are you actually saying interesting things? Are you just randomly waffling about stuff that's not important? And is the presenter able to clearly address questions? So if you haven't received questions, can you handle them in appropriate and clear manner? It doesn't say is the answer 100% correct. You don't get marks for that. It will help. But it's not like if you don't know something, you will be penalized excessively. So yeah, um again, this is, you know, the same thing is just ii just thought to illustrate it. Again, you get marked for the Q and A, the delivery and the content. It's the same. It's, this is the exact same as the posters. You know, you, it's here, you get so visual aids as your slides and your figures. That's four out of 20. The knowledge your content is eight out of 20. So that's stuff that you pre preprepared. You already know like what your topic is. You should know why you did your study. You should know what other literature exists out there on the day you get for eight, another eight marks for presentation skills that's for, did you engage the audience? Did you say things at the right volume? Did you have make eye contact. Did you say interesting things in, in appropriate time level? And then the final one is, well, if you, you know, did you participate, did you answer questions appropriately? That kind of thing? So the bulk of the marks you can get from home, 12 out of 20 you could get there, you can get without stepping into the room, you can know all the stuff you can make your slides interesting and you can actually have, you know, preprepared detailed answers as to why you did your work and no knowledge about that stuff. So it is possible to kind of think in that context. And then on the day, your charisma only gets you eight out of 20. So it's not, it's not unimportant because that might make all the difference between you winning a prize and not winning one, but it's not something you can control as much practice will help. But, you know, you've got to actually go up and say the right things at the right time as well. So now that we've covered this, I don't really have much else to say other than I wanted to go through the e ethical side of this stuff, no one really covers this and there are no like hard and fast rules. Um in terms of everything being perfectly laid out and what, what are the guidelines for ethical practice? Um It, it, it is a little bit of a gray area because there's no like, you know, the ICJ me kind of heavily regulate authorship for papers, but there's no equivalence for presentations. A lot of it is just kind of commonly understood. So for example, citations, you know, the plagiarism guidelines, you know, you shouldn't take anything from a source and not credit them. That's pretty standard knowledge, conflict of interest. Um Again, these still have to be reported on your presentations and your posters if your trial was funded or you have funding. So on my, any any work I do, I declare that I have funding from the British Heart Foundation for my phd that goes on it because even if the work has nothing to do with my P HDI, still have an interest with them as a result of the money they pay me and that needs to be put on there for transparency. So that still stays and accurate data of say this is a challenging one, you know, um some of it is very straightforward, like present data honestly. So don't make up stuff that's easy. But cherry picking data to support your conclusions, that's a bit more challenging because sometimes when you're writing an abstract, let's say you have six outcomes and three of them are significant. It's easy to just put those three and then, you know, later on in your post. So you might just kind of say, well, actually all six of them, only three of them are significant, but your abstract will look more strong as a result of that. So it's it's challenging to, to get that balance right between presenting your work in, in its best light or as opposed to just making it seem like your work has not got the flaws that it does have. So the there's a gray area there and there are no kind of precise rules to navigate this but being as transparent as possible, declaring as much of your data as you can and you know, being very clear. And as Irene said, people should see your work and your results and your methods and be able to replicate it. So if you are following those guidelines, you're more than likely on the right path, that's very important. Um One question, we get a lot, this is in the mentorship program or just generally, where do you present your work and how, what is the stance on multiple conferences? I've heard people say things like one national and one international conference is allowed. There's no real rule that says that there's no guideline on this. It's just the word of kind of professors and passed down through the ages kind of thing. So the truth is as long as you're presenting to an appropriate audience and your work is still novel. It's fine, you can send wherever you want. Um If that means you're sending your work to different conferences in different countries or you're going to different audiences like for example, I'm working on a stroke paper. If I was to go and present that a stroke conference and then like a cardiology or neurosurgery conference, there's still appropriate audiences. They just come from different perspectives because they all care about the outcome of facetime a stroke, they just care about it for a different reason. So they're all appropriate audiences. And in inadvertently, I would have presented my work to multiple places, but it's not overlapping because none of those people would have seen my work beforehand. So that's fine. Um Some conferences and journals will have a specification, say don't present work previously and then come back to us because they, for a variety of reasons. For one, it's originality for two, they're scared about, well, self plagiarism for three, if they have an associated journal that will publish the protocol, um not protocol, the abstract, they don't want the abstract to be published twice in different journals and clashes. So do check that stuff beforehand. Um Another concern is that you can start to eat into your peer reviewer pool when you eventually submit to a journal, technically peer reviewers. If they've already seen your work, they shouldn't be peer reviewing it because they already know what your work is. So they're biased, they're not gonna and then objectively, they can't be blinded because they know who you are as well. So it's, it's questionable for them to review your work. So if you attend too many conferences, the people who peer review conferences, I mean, your work, they've already been to that conference, that pool will shrink. So then what will end up happening is the journal will approach them to peer review your work. And they'll have, they'll have to decline because they'll say, well, I have a, I have a conflict. I already know what this work is. I know this author. So they'll have to say no. And then it gets passed on to another guy. What ends up happening is that will delay the publication of your work, the peer review of your work and potentially how long this whole process takes means that in that time you may get scooped, you may have funding issues. You know, there are reasons to not at least be mindful of this because you don't want to hurt yourself in the future. And it's uh but the thing is there are, there's no fixed guideline on this. So what I'm saying to you is obviously, it is subjective. It, it's based on personal experience and based on what we've seen in as an MRA over the, the past few years as well. So, you know, I've, I've seen people send the same abstract to at least 10 conferences and it works for them. But I've equally seen people who send it to two places and the second place is already unhappy that that it's been into one place before. So there's no guarantees when it comes to the stuff. But what you can do is you can be ethical, you can be transparent about where your work's going. You can try and put it in the right places and you can conduct yourself as ethically as possible. And in a way that maximizes your reach as well. That's the main message from all of this, to be honest and to wrap up, you know, the main things to take away from this is your work needs to speak for itself. You want it to be concise, to be impactful. You know, you want your presentation to be something that people will actually come and look at because of it. It's got a, a story, it's got impactful visuals. It, it's got to be something that's worth looking at or worth saying. Um you are at a conference obviously to network and to, to, you know, to disseminate your work. So go there with a, with that mindset of networking, finding collaborators, finding people who feedback on your work, follow up with them and keep those relationships healthy. But most importantly, yeah, just as long as you're, you're learning, you're being ethical and transparent about your work and you're well prepared, you really can't go wrong. That's the main thing, you know, it, it is a learning opportunity and one in which you will become a better scientist for having learned and attended these places. But uh that's, that's essentially the main thing for you to take away from this, you know, success isn't necessarily conveyed in. I won a prize. It's one in, am I a better scientist at the end of it? And uh yeah, thanks so much for listening guys. I'm happy to take any questions and obviously we'll stick around for a few minutes afterwards as well. So thank you everyone for coming today and thank you to our speakers. I think that was really insightful presentation on abstracts and conferences as well as how to um write a post. Um write a poster in ours. I've actually just put in the link for the feedback form. So please fill that in and you'll be able to claim your attendance certificate as well. And again, any questions for our speakers feel free to put it into the chat. Um um I think there are someone put into the chat earlier about, do you have a research community or group of people interest uh interested in doing one, especially surgical research? I think that might be something you can answer. I mean, that's literally where the M MRI exists. Yeah, of course. Um We, you know, we've been doing surgical projects since essentially day one. You know, my, even in my phd, like I specialize in cardi cardiac intervention, so surgery, um TVP CIS and anything that will make you will make your heart better, to be honest. So, yeah, we, you know, we do, we do a lot of that kind of work. Um If you do wanna reach out to us there, obviously, the social media is a good way to do it on our website. And just in general, we also have a form um we use which essentially you can join our wait list to join projects or you can pitch something to us honestly, if you really want to get somewhere and get our attention and do the most interesting work, pitch us an idea, you know, put in the form, tell us what you wanna do, why the project should be done? Where does it lead to and what support do you need from Murray? And I will probably review that myself within a week or two and get back to you and you know, we can launch something pretty interesting together. OK? And what other questions though there? OK. How do you handle your abstract, not being accepted for a conference? Um To be honest, it's really not the end of the world. Um I think the best advice I can give to that and this is also life advice is just outcome and difference, you know, objectively speaking, it won't matter if you, if you don't present at one particular conference because there's 100 other conferences and it's not like you can't just go and attend that conference anyway. Sometimes you can also, you know, yeah, like Irene said, you can take it as a learning opportunity, there will be feedback that they might, you can ask for feedback from them. You can ask to see if there's anything you can improve. You can get things better the next time basically. And uh yeah, just uh John V. Yeah. Uh where can we access the material from this presentation afterwards? So when this finishes, we will upload the recording to the meal, you can watch it all back. And because we were sharing slides, you'll be able to see both the commentary and also the slides at the same time. So that should be helpful to you. If there's any other questions or anything you'd like to get in touch about. Obviously, you can just reach out to an Mra and Irene did provide her email directly. But if you missed that, I'm happy to pass on any questions to and things like that to her. So, you know, we can always, we can always make sure that you're getting all the what you want out of this. Are there any conference that are more accessible to medical students? This is such a myth. I don't like that the way that people ask that there is no such thing as a medical student, appropriate conference. There are, there are there are conferences that are run by students and obviously, naturally because it's run by a student, you will anticipate that they will have some level of wanting to have other students there. And you know, that will be their target audience. That's as it is. But if your work is of sufficient quality, you can submit it anywhere you want. There is no kind of fixed or my work is ex ability because I'm a medical student and I think, I think it's, it's almost self limiting. You know, you think that because you're, you're a medical student, you can resubmit to a conference by medical students. That's, you're shooting yourself in the foot, in my opinion. Um, More broadly, how do we find a conference? That's a more interesting question. Um To be honest, the the best way to do it is to look at what the conference is aiming to achieve. So if it's a conference that is focused on a certain topic or a certain area, they themselves will tell you what it is and it will match in the themes of, you know, the same kind of speakers will attend. They'll have appropriate workshops on in that theme. If your work matches that theme, go for it. Like for example, if you're doing a medical education work, go to a medically or education, the conference go to as me uh the Association for Medical Education, go to their conference. So make your work there. They are one of the leading bodies in medical education. They will be most likely to want your work. Um Obviously do consider things like geographical location. Is it in a different country? Is it in a, does it work with your, your timetable with exams and whatever else you're doing. If it all lines up, go for it, if it doesn't and you, you know, then consider something else but don't apply to a conference with the outcome of, oh, I'll get in or, you know, they'll, they'll be more likely to accept my thing. I think overly analyzing things in that way, end up causing more anxiety than they actually help the. Ok. Does anybody have any other questions? Mm, thanks. Ok. I think we'll then we'll just call it a day. Um Thank you everyone for coming and I hope you guys um manage to learn a lot from this session. Thank you. Thank you all for coming and thanks for and Irene for coming and doing an amazing talk to everybody. No worries. Thank you for having me. Thanks everyone. Bye.