4 Research Courses Package

The package contains the following courses:

Course 1: Clinical Research Basic Skills Course

Introduction

• Introduction about the course
• Introduction to clinical research and benefits of clinical research
• Steps of clinical research
• How to develop a research idea and hypothesis
• How to test your idea or hypothesis
• Clinical research ethical/legal issues
• Search in the Literature

Protocol / Proposal Writing

• Writing proposal/protocol for your research

Study Design

• Introduction to Study Designs       
• Case reports and case series      
• Cross-sectional studies    
• Case-control studies                     
• Cohort studies
• Clinical trials
• Diagnostic accuracy studies

How to develop quessionnaire / case report form

• How to find data for your research idea + (sources for free available data) *
• How to develop a questionnaire for your study using Epi Info/Microsoft Word *
• How to translate a questionnaire and validate it*

Data collection / Type of Bias / Errors

• Pilot study concepts
• Data collection procedure *
• Type of bias and errors

Sample size calculation

• Principle concepts of sample size and power calculation 1
• Principle concepts of sample size and power calculation 2
• Description and application of sample size *
• Sample size calculation for:
  – Population survey *
  – Case-control studies *
  – Cohort studies *
• Other ways of sample size calculation based on other factors *

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Course 2: Medical Statistics using SPSS

Introduction to biostatistics

• Introduction to biostatistics
• Types of variables
• Principle of descriptive statistics
• Measure of central tendency and variance
• Null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis
• P-value and Confidence interval

Introduction to SPSS / Data Cleaning Skills

• Creating a New File / Opening a File
• Entering data in SPSS and create variables
• Simple Descriptive statistics / mean/median/mode score
• Data Cleaning / Creating Dummy Variable
• Selecting Cases
• Splitting a File
• Calculating a total score
• Creating an ID variable
• Recoding a continuous to an ordinal variable
• Recoding a continuous to a dichotomous variable
• How to deal with missing data

Assumptions / Difference Between Parametric and Non-Parametric Test

• Testing for Normality
• Parametric Test and Non-Parametric Test 1
• Parametric Test and Non-Parametric Test 2

Charts & Graphs

• Bar charts
• Line graphs
• Area charts
• Pie charts
• Scatter & dot plots
• Histograms
• Population Pyramid
• Boxplots

Associations Tests

• Fisher’s exact test (2 x 2 Independence)
• Chi-square test of association
• Relative risk (2 x 2)
• Odds ratio (2 x 2)
• Pearson’s correlation
• Spearman’s correlation
• Kendall’s tau-b

Differences between groups

• Independent-samples t-test
• Paired-samples t-test
• Mann-Whitney U test
• One-way ANOVA
• Kruskal-Wallis H test
• Wilcoxon signed-rank test

Survival analysis

• Kaplan-Meier
• Cox-Regression Analysis

Reliability

• Cronbach’s alpha
• Cohen’s kappa

Predictions Tests

• Linear regression
• Multiple regression
• Binomial logistic regression

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Course 3: Writing and Publishing Your Research Paper

Introduction to academic writing

• IMRaD structure
• Basic principles to consider during writing
• Punctuation uses in scientific writing *
• Paragraph structure
• Steps in writing a paper

Referencing using Endnote

• Reference (how to find suitable references)
• How to use Endnote *
• Checking Reference

Writing Original Manuscript

• Preparing Tables and Figures
• Writing results (statistical tests are explained in the statistical course) *
• Writing method sections *
• Reporting guidelines for main study types according to EQUATOR
• Writing introduction *
• Discussion writing *
• How to write abstract/summary *

Writing other types of publications

• Review articles
• Letter to editor / correspondence
• Case reports

Scientific Writing Issues

• Authorship and ICMJE guidelines
• Conflicts of Interest/copyright transform forms.
• Issues in scientific writing (plagiarism, ghostwriting, reproducibility of research)

Preparing manuscript and abstract

• How to format and prepare your manuscript for publications *
• How to select a suitable journal for your research
• How to submit your research to international conferences *
• How to prepare conference presentations (poster and oral presentation) *
• Reviewing process and comments*
• How to write a cover letter for journal submission *
• How to detect predatory journals?

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Course 4: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Introduction

• Introduction to Systemic reviews and meta-analysis
• The shift from narrative reviews to systematic reviews
• Main steps of systemic reviews and meta-analysis
• Formulate research question and ensure originality of your idea (PICO)
• Developing criteria for systemic review
• Prisma Statement 2020

Preparing protocol and search strategy

• Writing protocol and registering the protocol in PROSPERO
• How to develop search terms for each database
• Searching in literature and scientific databases
• Search in Pubmed
• Search in Scopus
• Search in Embase and Medline (OVID)
• Search in VHL
• Search in Cochrane Library
• Search in Web of Science
• Search in ClinicalTrials.gov
• Search in New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM)
• Search in System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe (SIGLE)
• Search in Google Scholar
• Search in CINAHL
• Extract search results using Endnote and Removing Duplicates
• PRISMA – Flow Diagram

Screening and Extraction and Quality Assessment

• Introduction to Screening & Extraction
• Initial Screening and identifying eligible articles for inclusion
• Full text download
• Full text screening
• How to develop extraction sheet
• How to extract data
• Quality assessment of studies
• Quality assessment of RCTs by Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool (ROB 2)
• Quality assessment of non-randomized studies of interventions by ROBINS
• Quality assessment of observational studies by Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) 
• Manual searching
• Baseline Characteristics Table
• Data Cleaning Before Doing Analysis
• Some calculations for missing or non-reported data

Introduction to Meta-Analysis

• Introduction to Meta-analysis
• Some Definitions
• Interpretation of forest plots
• How to choose an effect‐size index
• Effect Sizes Based on Means
• Effect Sizes Based on Binary Data
• Effect Sizes Based on Prevalence
• Fixed-effect and random-effects models
• Heterogeneity
• I2

Publication Bias

• Publication bias

Advanced Meta-analysis

• Subgroup analysis
• Sensitivity analysis
• Meta-regression analysis technique: concept, procedures, and interpretation

Writing Up

• How to write and prepare a systemic review and meta-analysis paper