Research Guidelines For MBBS students.

Research Guidelines For MBBS students.

Mostly this topic remains unexplained & untaught in our medical Colleges, although with our existing resources, we cannot even imagine to compete with the rest of the world, however, hospitals like Shaukat Khanum, Agha Khan do have the research requirements & they do help you out to join them for research electives.

Yet, Namcolians are ignorant of the word "Research", despite some study taught by Department of community medicine that, even in the remotest of chances, doesn't qualify as a true research valid for publication. And if you didn't learn to use SPSS there, I can feel sorry for you People.

Having said that, I will go stepwise for the research methodology that anyone at any college can apply to start a project that can be published in some good journal.

Ø First step in research process is making a team of dedicated people, who are actually "dedicated", there will be lots of offers of benefits provided in exchange of name in the papers, but trust me, thats the most unfair thing one can do with his own efforts.

Ø Once you have the Group that won’t back down, the second step is "ideas collection", as I said, everyone needs to work, so everyone needs to collect ideas, not just one student.  Bring a fresh good idea. Bring something, anything, steal someone's idea, do whatever, but don't ask anyone else, no one is going to give you a prepared supper for you to feast on, and that’s quite understandable.There is very little data in whole Punjab or even Pakistan. For a good idea, go to internet, and browse through the topics on any site, for example “Pubmed or Medline”. There are number of articles for every disease, with many of those those which you can apply at your Teaching Hospital. Find a topic related to a medium disease that can easily find in your Hospital. Search he the diseases on these sites and you will get ideas. Read the articles, and then find there practical nature, find out what good they will do if done at your hospital or college, find out what impact they have if they are conducted as study. Find a rarity, but not a rarity that has so rare patients that you cannot even find patients. Keep things simple.

Ø The third step after you have an idea is forming a closed questionnaire. By that, I mean go through the article related similar papers and find what were the basic findings by those papers. e.g. Almost all the papers start with demographic data of age, gender and other similar but relevant parameters. Go through the similar papers published, make a list of questions. The basic question is the idea of the study, i.e. suppose you are doing a study on post-op survival after a particular operation. The basic question is "Status of the patient" and options are A) Alive and B) Dead.

This question defines the dependent variable in your questionnaire on which the other independent variables will influence. e.g. effect of a particular complication on survival.

By forming a closed questionnaire, I don't mean to do stupid surveys (although they are good to start with) but surveys are public opinions that form the lowest type of research a person does, consequently, there is not much credit you gonna get out of that. However, questionnaire here means you devise a form on which you can note your findings, closed means that you choose the answer options for questions, like in the above example is either alive or dead, there is no third option, however, you might wanna add more options in age like <10>

After devising a questionnaire, you should show it to some reliable but experienced person who will tell you what changes you need to make it better. But thats an option only for the beginners, not for people who already have a couple of papers at their hands.

Ø The next step is "getting the questionnaire filled". Now this is the real hard work, you need to do it sincerely and consistently. Auto-fill options simply don't work, SPSS will give you the proof that if you fill the data yourself, there is no means you'll get reliable results in terms of statistics, thats why there is the concept of randomization.

There are two ways to get the questionnaires filled, prospective and retrospective. Both are acceptable methods, however, the retrospective ones saves a lot of time and efforts. Prospective means you go to the patients' beds and ask them questions as well as note data from their files, and it is also better in sense that you don't miss anything. Retrospective on the other hand means you go to the files section of the wards, get the records out of tons on dust, and sit there in the back rooms full of rats and mites, but rapidly take out the files of the disease of interest and note the data on the questionnaires formed by you. But despite quicker way of data collection, you'll have to compromise at several options that won't be mentioned by some doctor who was doing a special Sunday duty and was too tired to note all the findings. But that's also acceptable, as long as you mention at the end in your manuscript that how many patients data was insignificant in your findings.

Note the data as it is, do not try to manipulate it or make it significant yourself if it is not, you are not there to prove anything right or wrong that nature controls, just keep it the way it is.