LZSA Introduction to Dental Research

Deep work

'Deep work' is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. This book can help you focus your efforts and skills: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

Where to start? The research question

• Start from the beginning: The Research Question

How to Search

• PubMed (master this and you are done: What is in PubMed?)

• AI Search Tools: Elicit ($) - Consensus ($) and several more

• Many short videos with tips and AI tools for research

How to Read Dental Research

• Creating the reading habit: Méndez, M., 2018. Ten simple rules for developing good reading habits during graduate school and beyond. PLoS Comput. Biol. 14, e1006467.

• Basic: Understanding Health Research

• How to read the Dental literature JADA Guide

• The fundamentals of study design

• How to read any research paper: Reporting Guidelines

• Advanced: Johns Hopkins - Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

How to Analyze Data

• Essential: Data organization in spreadsheets & How to Share Data for Collaboration

• Beginner - Learn | RStudio Education and Web Tutorials: R Primers

• Book R for Data Science

• Seeing Theory, a visual introduction to basic stats concepts

• Statistics analysis: Statistics - A Full Lecture to learn Data Science

• Learn Statistics with JASP or Introductory Statistics for the Life and Biomedical Sciences

How to Create Data Visualizations

• Webinars: ggplot2 workshop part 1 + ggplot2 workshop part 2

• Best Practices for Data Visualisation

• Full tutorial Data Viz - Cedric Scherer

How to Manage References

• Paperpile ($)

• Zotero (free)

How to Write Dental Research

• Toolkit for writing research

• How to write a Dental Research paper

• Article writing essentials (PLOS)

How to Check your paper

• Paperpal

How to Increase your impact

• Research Culture is Broken; Open Science can Fix It | Rachael Ainsworth | TEDxMacclesfield

• Open Science: what, how & why? (subtitles)

• The Open Research Lifecycle | Center for Open Science

• FAIR data Knowledge clip: FAIR data principles

• (Optional: Book The Turing Way)

Additional Skills

For potential data scientists: Learn the basics of Phyton (if your interest is in machine learning/AI) or R (if your interest is data analysis)

AI courses: Google - Microsoft

About the Author

• Sergio Uribe, DDS, MSc, PhD. - Associate Professor and Lead Researcher, Dept of Conservative Dentistry and Oral Health, Riga Stradins University, Riga, Latvia

• Associate Editor Journal of Dental Research

• More info: https://www.sergiouri.be/ - Twitter: sergiouribe

Some tools I use frequently

• Reclaim for tasks and time management

• Paperpile for reference mananger

• Google Docs for writing, using versioning and tracking changes

• Grammarly for grammar and orthography

• A visual timer

• Focus mode on my phone from 8:00-13:00 and 14:00-18:00

Contents

Abstract

This lecture is designed to provide dental students with practical knowledge for their research journey. It will guide them through the entire research process, from the initial generation of research ideas to maximizing research impact through open science.

We will discuss:

Finding research ideas

• Where to look for research ideas, focusing on literature searches

• Refining research ideas

• Developing a research question

Tools for searching and planning research

• Various tools and resources are available for conducting a thorough literature search, including databases, search engines, and AI

• Developing a research plan

  • Ensuring alignment between the research question and study design

  • Developing a data collection plan

Data collection and management

• Tools for data collection

• Research data management

  • Data organization, documentation, and storage

• Exploratory data analysis techniques

  • Data visualization and summary statistics

Increasing the impact of research through open science

• How to increase the impact of dental research using open science principles

  • Pre-registration

  • Data sharing

  • Pre-prints

• Benefits of open science for dental research

• How to implement these practices in your research