Don’t Let Your Research Questions Go Out Without PICOTS

Doing Research / Grants & Funding

All the best aims are wearing PICOTS (pronounced “peacoats”). Specification of your PICOTS* is the minimum outerwear required to prevent your research question from being caught in a downpour of questions. Having these details tucked in gets you ready to have a meaningful conversation with colleagues, evaluate feasibility, brainstorm about how to get the best study done, and prepare to share your concept:

P = Population

I (E) = Intervention (Exposure)

C = Comparator

O = Outcome

T = Timing

S = Setting

Use PICOTS as a checklist for operationalizing research questions and probing how the research would shape up under different assumptions. Ask:

Population: 

  • What group of participants is ideal?
  • Whom does this imply we need to include or exclude?
  • How would we operationalize those criteria?
  • What influence will that have on ability to identify participants/recruit well?
  • Do we need to worry about proof of concept or generalizability more at this stage?

Intervention:

  • What will participants do/experience in the study that is being tested for its effects?
  • What dose, frequency, intensity will be tested?
  • Do we need to invoke a specific behavioral or causal model?

Or Exposure:

  • What is the behavior, biomarker, experience, metric for which we are interested in evaluating the effect?
  • How will it be measured?
  • How will we ensure quality of the measure?

Comparator:

  • What comparison provides the most relevant contrast (e.g. usual care, no intervention, placebo, etc)?
  • What analytic approach will best support the comparison?
  • Does this comparator help test our causal model or could it be stronger and more direct?

Outcome:

  • What is our measurable outcome?
  • How will measurement be operationalized?
  • Do we need primary and secondary outcomes?
  • Can we achieve adequate power to assess the outcome?
  • If there is loss to follow-up, do we have alternative ways of assessing outcomes?

Timing:

  • Over what time frame will participants be recruited?
  • What is the time period over which intervention will be conducted for an individual participant?
  • How long after completion of intervention will measures be collected?
  • When will outcomes measured? How wide is the tolerable window for measurement?

Setting:

  • Where will the research be conducted or participants be recruited (e.g. academic tertiary care center, network of health department clinics, community-based, etc.)?
  • What are the characteristics of that setting?
  • If extant data, what was the setting in which the data was developed?

Try it, you’ll like it. And it’s better than the alternative of getting soaked later by questions and requests for details needed to clarify your concept for the research.

Taking PICOTS for a Spin

For example, if you’re interested in asking: “Do community-based lifestyle interventions really work?” or “What determines who stays in community-based lifestyle interventions?” work the PICOTS:

Initial Question: “Do community-based lifestyle interventions really work?”

Goal: Pilot intervention study with a primary aim of determining if an intervention results in weight loss

In this case a pilot would be a typical approach for estimating the effect size, feasibility, participant satisfaction, loss to follow-up, and need for adjustments to inform design of a future definitive randomized trial. So we sketch a picture of what the study could look like:

P: Adult women with physician’s permission who are registered for the first session of the 12-week New Beginnings Program, and who speak English or Spanish.

I: Structured small group (n=5 to 8) coaching program with 1) specific weekly goal setting targets (eliminating sodas, understanding metabolic effects of exercise and tracking, counting carbohydrates, planning daily physical activity, enhancing sleep, writing an individual vision for one’s health, making a long term health contract with oneself, etc.) 2) three small group resistance and circuit training coached sessions each week, 3) social media peer connections, and 4) individualized exercise, diet and stress-reduction prescriptions.

C: Women who have applied for the program and are eligible but who are currently on the wait list with an anticipated wait time of 14 or more weeks.

O: Primary outcome will be weight loss, measured as difference between first measurement (in pounds to one decimal place on scale provided and calibrated by the study) at intake session and weight at the last group session. Outcomes will be grouped by completion status where completers attended ≥75% of schedule sessions and non-completers fewer sessions. Weight loss will also be described by group for each of the 12 weeks. For secular trend among those with an intention to lose weight the wait list comparison (secondary analysis) group weight will be collected from initial application (or as documented in physician’s permission letter in application) and weight at intake session, adjusted for elapsed time between application and start of program.

T: The intervention will last for 12 weeks of structured lifestyle and exercise coaching. Informal peer and social media networks established during the intervention will continue unsupervised after completion. Secondary outcome data will be collected at 3, 6, and 12 months after completion of the intervention.

S: Privately owned gym facility partnered with non-profit (501C3) to provide a comprehensive lifestyle intervention program to means-tested low income women, the majority of whom are age 40 and older, African American and weigh, on average, more than 200 pounds.

Initial Question: “What determines who stays in community-based lifestyle interventions?”

Goal: Observational study of whether baseline mental and physical health status, locus of control, and dispositional optimism are associated with completion of a community-based lifestyle intervention

P: Adult women with physician’s permission who are registered the 12-week New Beginnings Program which is a structured small group (n=5 to 8) coaching program with 1) specific weekly goal setting targets (eliminating sodas, understanding metabolic effects of exercise and tracking, counting carbohydrates, planning daily physical activity, enhancing sleep, writing an individual vision for one’s health, making a long term health contract with oneself, etc.) 2) three small group resistance and circuit training coached sessions each week, 3) social media peer connections, and 4) individualized exercise, diet and stress-reduction prescriptions.

E: Lower levels^ of physical and mental health as assessed by Short Form 36, lower self-efficacy (assessed by Generalized Self-efficacy Sale), and greater pessimism (assessed by the Revised Life Orientation Test) at baseline.

C: Higher levels^ of physical and mental health as assessed by Short Form 36, internal locus of control, and greater optimism at baseline incorporated into logistic regression models to assess association of characteristics with outcome.

^ Cut offs to be determined by distribution of traits in context of national normative reference data.

O: Program completers will be classified as those who attended ≥ 75% of scheduled sessions and non-completers fewer sessions. Will also capture week of attendance for secondary analysis in time-to-event analysis.

T: The assessment will be completed within 12 weeks.

S: Privately owned gym facility partnered with non-profit (501C3) to provide a comprehensive lifestyle intervention program to means-tested low income women, the majority of whom are age 40 and older, African American and weigh, on average, more than 200 pounds.

But I can’t possibly know these details when I first think the thought!?

True, but you can get much closer than you think. Start by daydreaming and then add parameters that are initially fantasy. The approach to shaping questions jumpstarts thinking that then leads to:

  • Productive generation and sifting of research ideas.
  • Greater focus for literature review.
  • Strategic thinking about multiple aspects of feasibility .
  • Weighing the best choices for measures of exposure, covariates, and outcomes.
  • Enhanced ability to rapidly gather input from others.

Related Posts:

Acing Your Observational Research Aims

All research proposals – grants, dissertations, internal funding – must ace the description of aims.  Many scientific questions are interesting.  Not all are useful.  You must persuade your readers that the proposed aims/hypotheses to be tested and the related analysis will fill gaps in scientific knowledge.

Don’t Crash on Approach

Getting the approach – the methods section of your grant –  fine-tuned is literally the heart of it all. You must land your science smoothly. Study section members know, and recent evidence confirms, your grant’s score is not an equal weighting of component scores. NIH criterion scores are for significance, innovation, approach, investigators, and environment.

* Gordon Guyatt initially described PICOTS in Guyatt G, Drummond R, Meade M, Cook D. The Evidence Based-Medicine Working Group Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature. 2nd edition. McGraw Hill; Chicago: 2008. Subsequently the framework became standard for formulating inclusion and exclusion criteria for conduct of systematic evidence reviews and meta-analyses of interventions.

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Publishing Null Results

Doing Research / Writing & Publishing

Nearly every scientist has felt the frustration of pouring effort, money and (sometimes) tears into a project only to get null results. The elusive p<0.05 decides whether results get published or not—the oft-mentioned file drawer problem. Others have explained better than I can why this is a problem. Rather, I’d like to contribute some tips I’ve picked up on how to publish null results.

  • Combine results with a significant result. If the story of the paper allows it, consider adding the null results to another related analysis and publishing one big paper. I’ve had some success with this myself, where I decided to include three analyses of biomarkers that were non-significant with one that was.
  • Consider different journals. There is a bias to not even review null results. So consider other options such as open access journals or lower tier journals. The science still gets out there and a publication is better than no publication. Some journals specifically focus on null results such as PLOS One’s Missing Pieces and the Journal in Support of the Null Hypothesis. While I personally haven’t tried any journals focusing on null results, I have had some success looking beyond the top tier journals in my field and even considering journals in other fields.
  • Don’t give up easily, but know when to fold. One part of publishing null results is getting used to rejection, particularly not even having papers reviewed. If you know your methods are solid and your science strong, don’t give up. Human beings are prone to bias and this likely includes a bias against wanting to publish null results (particularly if it counters a favored hypothesis or theory). Be mindful, though, of how much time you have to spend reformatting for different journals compared to the time you need to spend on other responsibilities. There is no shame in giving up once you’ve made a good effort.
  • When designing your study or analysis, try to design it in such a way that even null results are interesting. This, obviously, won’t help after you’ve analyzed your data but you can still consider why the null results would be useful.
  • Add power analyses. I’ve tried this myself and it does seem to help. Showing that your study was powered to find a typical effect size for your field helps establish that the result wasn’t just because the study was too small or had too much error.

These strategies don’t negate the root cause of the file drawer problem, namely a publication system that wants flashy, highly citable papers, and null results just aren’t that. I don’t have any good suggestions for how to solve the systemic parts of the problem except what others have already said: more journals that specifically publish null results or having current journals commit to publishing more null results or abandoning p-values altogether. Hopefully these tips will help other new scientists until the field addresses the problem.

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How to Protect Your Protected Time

Doing Research / Faculty Life / Productivity

You’ve just gotten your K award—awesome!  75% of your professional effort is now protected to focus on your research and career development.  But wait.  What about that class you teach, or those days your department expects you to be in clinic, or the students whose dissertation committee you’re on, or…

Keeping 75% of your time protected can quickly get complicated.  Compliance experts Tesha Garcia-Taylor, MBA, and Robert Dow, MBA, recently presented to a group of Vanderbilt career development awardees their top tips for keeping on the straight and narrow.

First, consider the pie.  Pizza, if you like.  The pie is all of the effort you give to your work in an average year, across research, clinical, teaching, and any other activities you probably wouldn’t do unless your institution was paying you.  It includes everything from being in the OR to reading cell cultures to preparing a class syllabus to checking your work email.  Of this entire pie, 75% (six slices of your standard eight-slice pizza) should be a.) your research, or b.) your career development, which can include writing grants, presenting your work at meetings, and other things that might not be specifically sitting at a bench/interviewing research subjects/analyzing data that we’ll get to in a moment.

“But I’m in clinic 15 hours a week.  Isn’t that more than 25% of a week?”  Well, what’s a normal work-week for you?  More importantly, what’s a normative week for your profession?  Specifically, for your specialty—surgeons are more likely to work 80-hour weeks on a standard basis than PhD scientists, for example.  At Vanderbilt, a typical work-week for most, not all, of our faculty is right around 60 hours.  So 15 hours a week of clinic would actually be exactly 25% of a week in that scenario.  (This ignores the fact that you might also want/need to do things like go to grand rounds or complete compliance training, teach clinical trainees, etc., so best not to assume that 15 hours is all you’d be doing that isn’t research or career development.)

“Okay, but half the faculty in our tiny department just went on maternity leave, and I have to teach this and cover for that and all these other things.  I can’t just say nope, sorry.  What do I do?”

Option 1: Explode your workweek to 100 hours.  Fit in 25 hours of teaching/clinic/other and focus on your career development for 75.  We at Edge for Scholars (also anyone sane) do not recommend this option.

Option 2: Let the class/clinic/whatever take up 40% of your time this month or quarter, but devote 90% to your K work for the next month/quarter.  Effort should average out over the year, not the day or even the month.  That said, keeping effort balanced each quarter is preferable, because it’s easy to let things slide until there’s not enough time left in the year to get the right average.

Option 3: Say to your leadership, “I’m coming up on my annual progress report/I’m six months into my award/I’m [fill in appropriate time marker here], and I’m concerned that things aren’t squaring up with my effort on this K award.”  It’s not an urban legend that institutions around the country have had to give back money to the feds because they didn’t let a K awardee have his or her protected time.  Your department doesn’t want to give back grant money or be scrutinized by the compliance office or NIH, we promise.

However, the best time to discuss your effort with your boss is before you submit the grant proposal.  Mutually decide what activities you will put down if you get the award, and get that agreement in writing in the letter of institutional support.  When thinking about what you would drop to focus on your K award, consider a few things:

What can you really not miss?  If everyone in your department including Professor Multimillion Dollar Lab goes to the department seminar, you’re going to the seminar.  But that likely means you can miss journal club.  Go to the things that are most relevant to you, not to every event.

As well, what national things should you keep attending?  If you’re going to a meeting to network with potential collaborators and disseminate your research, of course keep going; this falls under your K effort.  But if, for example, the society for your specialty has an annual meeting that’s mostly attended by clinicians in private practice, you don’t necessarily need to be the one who takes the residents there to present.  Consider attending some meetings every other or every few years.

Does it overlap? Many activities that look like service may ultimately end up feeding into your research.  Say you need to learn how to read a particular kind of PET scan or a how to perform a new microscopy technique, so you visit a colleague and learn it from them.  In learning the new thing, you work on scans or samples from your colleague’s work that need to be read/analyzed.  Does this help them get through a number of scans or samples?  Sure, but it also helps you master these skills, so as far as the feds are concerned, that effort fits with your K.  Similarly, teaching a student who’s working on your research may pay dividends for them in the form of a degree, but it also helps your research get done.

Get to know your financial officers.  They want to help you understand and comply with regulations around effort.  If you don’t already receive a monthly budget and effort report, ask for regular updates to make sure they line up with reality.  This will become even more important as you move on to larger grants and run a bigger research team.

Protecting 75% of your time requires you to be proactive.  Check in regularly with yourself to make sure you’re spending the right amount of effort on your K work, and follow the advice above if things start looking unbalanced.

More Resources

Designing Your Career

Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Career Development Awards 

More Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K

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Not that Kind of Year: Tales of Year 1 as a New PI

Doing Research

It has been about a year since I started my new position as a principal investigator (PI) at Clinical Department in R1 University. It has been a challenge. Here are my suggestions on surviving the first year, based on areas where I succeed and failed. As always these days, n=me.

Find your people: The shock of loneliness in the first year is significant. You no longer have a built-in community of graduate students and postdocs with which to spend time. Your employees and your trainees cannot be your friends. You are their employer and/or mentor, and while this leaves abundant room for kindness, compassion, and well-wishes, the power differential is prohibitive for true friendship with your staff and trainees. The easiest way to deal with this loneliness is to find your community. Potential communities include other new PIs in your department, your institution, or your professional society. There are even peer-to-peer mentoring groups, like New PI Slack, which provide access to a community of new PIs who have gone, are going, or will go through similar trials and tribulations. However you decide to do it, make sure you find a community to support you and that you can support in turn.

Find balance with life: This has been a point of failure for me. I let the work take over this year. Do better than I did. Make sure you leave dedicated time for your hobbies, friends, and family. The administrative work will be there Monday morning too.

Find balance with collaborations: Find a balance in starting collaborations and be protective of your time. As a new PI you have a pot of unallocated money that you can invest in projects of interest. Established PIs know this as well, and you can find yourself paying for their pilot projects out of your start-up. As with all things, you need to carefully weigh whether this pilot study will translate into a grant or if it is a one-off experiment that will collect dust. You also do not want to work in a silo. It can be difficult to get that first senior author paper or grant, and by working with more seasoned investigators, you can build your publication record and grant support. My suggestion would be to find one or two PIs with whom you would be happy to collaborate and build those relationships. I have recently become very protective of my time and accepted that just because someone wants to work on my Terrible Disease of Interest, does not mean they have to work on it with me. I have instead cultivated two collaborations at my institution which have resulted in two grant submissions that were largely driven by my collaborators.

Find mentors: Even though you are a faculty member now, you still need mentors, and particularly mentors at your institution. While your mentors can provide scientific input, their roles are now focused on objectively evaluating your progress towards tenure. Some departments have this mentoring requirement formally established—others do not. Either way, establish a mentoring committee and make your semi-annual meetings a priority. It is much better to hear from your mentoring committee that you are not on track to achieve tenure versus hearing it from the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) committee after formal review. I meet with my committee every six months, and we discuss everything from funding to manuscripts to teaching and service.

Build good relationships with university officials: Get to know the people who make lab life possible. This includes individuals like the departmental administrator who reviews your grants before they are submitted to the Office of Research, individuals in the Finance Office, the Director of Facilities who provides building access and mediates installing big equipment, and the head of Procurement who signs off on big orders. In some departments, you might be able to delegate this to an administrative assistant or administrator. My approach has been to do it myself. It takes half the time and the next time I need something, like building access for an undergraduate student, I can take care of it quickly.

Write things down and get organized: This is the time to develop on-boarding documents for new hires, update lab protocols to reflect current equipment, generate lists of laboratory reagents (including how to order them), and develop lab policies (code of conduct, travel policy, etc.). Identify a way to have staff and trainees access and update documents through Google Drive or Box. Developing these resources and documents is quite a bit of work, but it lays the groundwork for the lab to grow and remain organized. One of the things that I did not do was develop written expectations for staff and trainees. This has resulted in some unpleasant back and forth with an undergrad about what my expectations were for them. It would have benefited us both to have a signed document for them to reference. Developing this document is currently on my priority list.

Practice saying no: You do not have to do all the things in your first year. Focus on getting the lab established and everything in place. Service on committees can surely wait until year 2 or 3. You do not have to work with everyone, you do not have to apply for every single grant mechanism available to you, and you surely do not have to agree to give every seminar or attend every conference in your field the first year. My department and institution have been reasonable in their expectations, but I did find myself saying yes to a lot of national conferences and seminars this year. While this is an excellent issue to have, my absence from the lab for such extended periods of time slowed research progress and impeded training. This, in turn, has delayed some of our grant submissions. Whether the national exposure versus manuscript/grant submission progress was a wise choice remains to be seen. On a personal note, all the travel did not contribute to work-life balance.

Celebrate the little things: We would all like to celebrate the big things, like papers in press or big grants awarded. While these are worthy goals for your first year, they can be difficult to achieve. Celebrate the little things, like the first experiment, the first figure for a paper, or the first lab poster. This has helped keep me motivated and lab members excited about progress while we work towards the big ticket items.

With these thoughts in mind, I go into the new year and into year 2. The upcoming year will be a busy one, with R01 submissions, dreams of two papers submitted, some teaching about Terrible Disease, and a couple new conferences to attend. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

Tune Your When, How Much, and What in Your Days

Not that Kind of Investment: Tales of Time Commitment

Staying Mentally Well in Academia is a Balancing Act

Published by: 2

Not that Kind of Doctor: Tales of a PhD in a Clinical Department

Doing Research

As long as I have been in science, my research has always been a mix of basic science and translational studies, nestled in a clinical department. This convergence of PhD-initiated basic science questions in a clinical setting has led to some fantastic collaborations and deep introspection about how we define ourselves as scientists and how we find our departmental fit. Views are my own, based on my experiences (n=me).

The perks: Working in a clinical department has many advantages. You are closer to the patients and the clinicians who treat them. This gives you access to expertise, tissues, and clinical data normally outside your reach. These patient interactions can translate into philanthropy for the department, which can fund small pilot projects, conference travel, and even new equipment. Clinical colleagues have herds of motivated medical students looking for small research projects that, if you are clever, you can dovetail into some of your own research. Your clinical colleagues also have a different skill set that you can leverage against a common problem of interest. In addition to the intellectual input your clinical colleagues provide, this can also include assistance with difficult small animal surgeries, pathology scoring, or institutional review board (IRB) preparation. For me, the most significant part of my clinical department appointment is that it keeps the disease research at the forefront of my mind. Even if the project is asking a very basic question, I am always thinking about what it could mean for understanding, detecting, or treating my Terrible Disease of Interest.

The challenges: There are, of course, challenges with working in a clinical department. Here are the challenges I have seen, and how I started to deal with them.

Patients come first: Patients will always come first, and they should. This means meetings get pushed back, happen at odd times, or get outright cancelled. I have accepted that larger meetings and conferences happen very early in the morning or late in the afternoon to accommodate more clinicians. For smaller meetings, for example with my Chair, I work closely with the administrative assistants to schedule meetings on lower volume clinic or administrative days. This does not always work out, but it increases the odds I will actually have my meeting.

Busy clinicians: My clinical colleagues wear many hats. Aside from their considerable clinical duties, they mentor residents and fellows, lead NIH panels, develop clinical guidelines, serve on study section, and some even run their own research programs. I have become more appreciative of the time they commit to research, and learned to accept that their time is structured differently than mine, especially if their protected time is limited. My first step in every collaboration is determining how much time they are able and/or willing to contribute. Is it a quick coffee chat about treatment strategies as a consultant? A plan for providing access to their database as a co-investigator? Or are they going to start attending our lab meetings and we will put in a grant together as collaborators?

Different lives: While there are a number of really talented physician-scientists who live both PhD and MD life, most clinical departments are staffed by MDs concerned with clinical practice and PhDs concerned with lab life. My clinical colleagues are concerned with their patients, their case load, residents, and publications/abstracts. Some do health services research. On the flip side, my PhD colleagues are worried about teaching, tenure, grants, and publications. Neither life is easy, even if it looks like it sometimes. It is best to accept that we have different concerns, not dwell on the details, and support each other as colleagues.

Small number of basic scientists: Clinical departments tend to have a smaller basic science contingent. This sometimes leads to seminars and retreats focused more on clinical agendas, rather than research. My solution for this has been to become a secondary faculty member in a basic science department. I identified a larger department that had a weekly seminar, an annual retreat, and a good amount of graduate students and postdocs. Joining this department has provided a much needed basic science department feel, where a good mechanism, even if it does not translate into the clinic, is appreciated. Moreover, this secondary department provides access to graduate students and a social home for postdocs. It has also exposed me to academic faculty life with committees, faculty meetings, and teaching opportunities. The most important part of my secondary appointment, however, is that I do not have an agenda for the department. I am not competing for space, resources, or tenure lines relative to my research interests. Instead, I enjoy departmental life, with a little bit of department service as a price.

In summary, the things that make being in a clinical department so valuable, can also make being a basic scientist in said clinical department a challenge. But it is worth it. Now, excuse mw while I get ready for this 7am meeting. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

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Best Poster Resources for Trainees

Doing Research

Scientific Poster Roundup

Get your scientific posters on point by visiting these sites for inspiration, how-to guides, and other free resources:

More top resources on infographic resources and getting the most out of conferences:

Nine Protips on Meeting, Greeting and Getting It Done Like a Rockstar

Spring Conference Season Essentials

The Newbie’s Excellent Infographic Adventure

DIY Infographics: 3 Tips and 3 FREE Resources

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Using BioVU for Research

Doing Research

BioVU is a biobank of de-identified DNA samples and genetic data to fuel discovery. The “banked” DNA is from routine patient care-associated tests that would otherwise be discarded. The bank was developed as part of The Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR) and is intended for broad collaborative use. With over a decade of growth and refinement that enables the biobank to offer a wealth of deliverables and time saving operations to facilitate research.

If you are probing -omics contributions to disease risk, new interventions and therapeutics, prognostic markers or relations among phenotypes, BioVU can:

  1. Expedite discovery with large sample size and existing samples and data from more than 300,000 samples (adult and pediatric)
  2. Reveal new relationships among genetic signatures and health outcomes
  3. Shrink the Internal Review Board (IRB) application by leveraging de-identified medical records linked to de-identified samples (de-identified subjects = non-human study determination)
  4. Leverage over 2 million medical records and/or hundreds of thousands of DNA samples to deliver statistical power
  5. Collaborate with researchers across other DNA banks

BioVU will take care of:

  1. Collecting samples from otherwise discarded blood without disrupting clinical care to extract DNA
  2. Banking DNA from consented patients to await researcher request
  3. Linking DNA and genetic data to de-identified medical records of patients
  4. Providing researcher datasets and DNA

Researchers from other institutions are welcomed to leverage the power of BioVU and will need to identify a Vanderbilt collaborator to get started. Collaboration is strongly encouraged to drive inclusion of diverse disciplines, conceptual models, and backgrounds of expertise and experience. BioVU may be able to help guide you toward collaborators and provide consultation for your project idea.

Contact the BioVU team at biovu@vanderbilt.edu for general questions, consultations, and other insights.

More information about BioVU.

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Tips for Conquering the Literature

Doing Research / Writing & Publishing

As a new graduate student, I struggled with identifying the most relevant papers, organizing interesting publications, and remembering why I flagged an article as “Super Important!!!” months after I read it. I’ve synthesized a few tips for taming the task:

1. Identify relevant articles:

Pick an approach for keeping up with new publications and tailor your strategy to current needs. My favorite methods include:

  • Subscribing to journal table of contents: This is my favorite way to keep up with what’s new in my field. I recommend subscribing to 3-6 journals most relevant to your work. (I can tell you from experience, subscribing to two dozen is too many. You want to manage your subscriptions so you can reasonably follow up and read articles you’re interested in within the week.) If you don’t know which journals to follow, identify those your group typically targets as first choice for a new publication.
  • Citation alerts: Creating citation alerts on PubMed or Web of Knowledge will regularly send relevant literature your way. You can create an alert for a general search using keywords and Boolean logic (e.g., [“Leiomyoma” OR “Uterine fibroids”] AND “Preterm Birth”) or set an alert for whenever a single, pivotal article is cited. For general alerts, I refine the search so it returns 15-30 articles a week. Creating an alert that is too broad (e.g., “Pregnancy”) will lead to time wasted digging for the articles you’re truly interested in.
  • RSS feeds: Instead of receiving regular emails, you can use RSS feeds to keep up with the literature. Apps like Feedly can collect the same information table of contents email subscriptions would give you and prevent inbox clutter. However, I advise you to stick to one method for tracking new publications, since using multiple platforms is difficult to manage and can lead to redundant work.

2. Choose a reference manager:

Select a reference manager early on and commit to it. Knowing and leveraging the features of your reference manager will make your life much easier. Several good options exist, but my favorite is EndNote because of its ability to find and attach the full-text paper for an imported reference, its filing and annotation capabilities, and its integration with Word. Talk to others about the pros and cons of their favorite reference manager. Once you choose a manager, educate yourself on how to use its features (YouTube is a great place to start). The time you invest here will pay off!

3. Stay organized:

Now that you’re set up with a reference manager and you have new articles coming in on a regular basis, you need a plan for organizing what you read. I recommend setting aside time every week to go through your table of contents and citation alerts and read articles that strike your interest. Once you have imported a citation into your reference manager, file it immediately! (If you do not have time to read right away, create a “Read this Week” file and promise yourself to read and appropriately file those articles by Friday evening.) File articles under a folder that will help you remember why you were interested in the first place. Some of my file names are “Quantitative Methods,” “Reproductive Epidemiology,” “Clinical Applications,” etc. Even better, when you have specific projects underway, file the citation under the project(s) for which you may cite it. EndNote allows you to file one article in numerous places, so file away!

4. Read to write:

While reading new science is fun, most of us do not read as an end unto itself. Instead, we should read with potential applications in mind. Specifically, consider how a publication may demonstrate the need for your current project or how it may frame the context for your work. In EndNote, you can create a “Group Set,” which is simply a family of files. I create a Group Set for each planned manuscript and create files within the set for different parts of a paper (e.g., Introduction, Methods, Discussion). Filing articles by specific sections of future manuscripts will make the writing process much easier. Further, it is helpful to record how you hope to cite the article in your current work. I once had a mentor who advised me when reading for a specific project to write a citation on one side of a notecard and, after reading the publication, draft the sentence in which I would cite it on the other. When it comes time to write, organize the notecards to create a story and the manuscript (or thesis chapter) would write itself. While I wish I could say I diligently carry around a stack of notecards, I have modified his advice to fit with my digital work style. EndNote allows you to create custom fields for citations. It’s infinitely helpful to create a “Main Point” or “Application” field where you can record information you plan to incorporate into your writing.

5. You put in the effort, might as well network!

If you come across a publication you think a colleague will enjoy, don’t hesitate to pass it along. Most people will appreciate a short message to the effect of, “This publication made me think of our conversation about your work on Hippogriff mating patterns.” Such a message shows you paid attention when they were telling you about their work and may bring a helpful publication to their attention. If you’re trying to establish a professional presence online, retweet publications you find particularly interesting. The authors will appreciate the extra press and your enthusiasm for your field will show. These two practices will demonstrate your active engagement with the literature and will help distinguish your voice within your field.

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How to Use ResearchMatch To Ignite Recruitment

Doing Research

Want to make use of a FREE national recruitment tool to find study participants?

ResearchMatch is a disease-neutral, institution-neutral recruitment resource with over 140,000 volunteers registered and willing to participate in research. ResearchMatch currently serves over 7,000 researchers at 165 institutions.

Follow these quick steps to learn if ResearchMatch can be a helpful resource in your recruitment plans.

  1. Find out if your institution is already a registered user of ResearchMatch by searching here.
  2. If yes, celebrate by doing the happy dance. Then, join ResearchMatch by signing up with your institutional email.
  3. If no, then email info@researchmatch.org to learn how to onboard your institution so that you and your colleagues can gain access to ResearchMatch. Sharing is caring, and they will appreciate you taking the lead on this!
  4. Find potential matches by performing your first feasibility search. Do this BEFORE you register your study to learn how many volunteers meet the search criteria you entered. Need help with your first search? Check out this quick tutorial on How To Perform a Feasibility Search.
  5. Promising feasibility search results? Great! Now it’s time to begin recruiting (after you have included ResearchMatch in your IRB-approved recruitment plan, of course). Watch this tutorial on How to Add a Study and Contact Volunteers.
  6. Now that your study is on ResearchMatch and you’ve found volunteers who may be a good fit, ResearchMatch contacts potential volunteers on your behalf and allows them to choose to opt in or opt out of being contacted by your study. Researchers receive contact information for only those volunteers who responded ‘Yes, I’m interested’ via email. Then your team takes it from there to screen the interested volunteers for further eligibility requirements.

Note: Be sure that your study team is prepared for the likely influx of responses following the use of ResearchMatch!

You’re obviously interested in being a recruitment ROCKSTAR, so check out these other solid and FREE resources for researchers:

The Trial Innovation Network Recruitment & Retention Toolkit

e-Recruiting: Using Digital Platforms, Social Media, and Mobile Technologies to Improve Clinical Trial Enrollment

Learn more about the development of ResearchMatch:

ResearchMatch: A National Registry to Recruit Volunteers for Clinical Research

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Resilience as a Common Trait in Researchers

Doing Research

This encouraging article in the NY Times reminded me of a question that was asked by an undergraduate student eight years ago. “What is the most important skill for a career in science?” I was a new PI and a panelist for our undergrad career night. I blurted out “resilience,” and most of us laughed and agreed. It got me thinking that resilience might truly be a shared trait among scientists, partly innate and partly learned.

Some people are naturals. My scientist husband is almost always optimistic, excited about the future, certain that discovery is right around the corner. Unfortunately, I am not a natural. But I think I’ve become sufficiently resilient over the years.

One time in grad school I complained to my mom that my experiments never worked at first. They needed to be repeated many times to troubleshoot the process and get it right. She said, “I’m so happy that you chose a profession that forces you to fail. You perfectionists need to learn how to deal with failure, and it sounds like you picked the right career.” Sigh. Thanks, Mom.

She was right, of course. I stopped taking it personally when the experiment didn’t work. If you stick with it, you get to have that delicious, heady feeling that comes when you learn something about nature that no one else knows (yet). It is humbling.

The other reason that science demands resilience is that our work is peer-reviewed. Not only do we doubt our abilities from time to time. There are plenty of brilliant people around to doubt us too. If you’re going to publish your work or get a grant, you’re going to have to put yourself out there for others to judge. What is more personal than your work – your methods, your approach and your thoughts about what it all means? It’s like being inspected in your underwear.

If our reviewers are doing their job right, they will be looking for the flaws. Hopefully they will give us some concrete suggestions for improvement. I am now at the point where I feel gratitude for those reviewers, because they really are trying to help make the paper better.

But. I don’t even have to say it. Not every reviewer does a good job. You know that feeling when you are reading a review, and the person is not only nasty but also wrong? I hear the blood pounding in my temples. What about the feeling when you learn you are not getting the grant that you were sure to get. Dark days.

The question is, why keep going after a disappointment? For me, it comes down to being curious. I just want to know the answer. It’s waiting to be discovered, and I think I know the way to answer it. So I have to figure out a way to keep going so I can find out. I also have to read the book to the end, even if I stay up all night. So maybe scientists need to be both resilient and insatiably curious.

It’s good to grieve, and to rant, and rage at the system. I do all those things. Then I go back to work, because it’s fun. We are lucky if we get paid to do it. I wouldn’t mind a little more funding, though. Just saying.

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