Research by the Medical Resident

Internal Medicine Programs have been asking their residents to conduct research during their training. Although an excellent idea, residents for the most part have little experience in conducting research projects and they have difficulty in coming up with the right research question given the time constraints and other responsibilities they have.

The following is an annotated bibliography of material used in teaching a course on research methods for Internal Medicine residents at Prince George's Hospital Center. The course is comprised of a set of lectures that deal with the practical aspects of research. The intended audience is residents in training, although anyone interested in a refresher course may find the material palatable.

References:

  1. Kahn RC. Picking a research problem: The critical Decision. N Engl J Med. 1994;330:1530-1533. Ronald Kahn puts forth the "Ten Commandments" about how to pick a research problem. This is a must read article. It is the first step for anyone interested in research and just has no idea what or how to go about it.
  2. Lundberg GD, Glass RM. What does authorship mean in a peer-reviewed medical journal?. JAMA. 1996;276:75. The authors, both Editors at JAMA, define who should be an author and credibly should be on the authorship list of a publication.
  3. Mimi Zeiger. Writing the first draft. In: Zeiger M. Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers. McGraw-Hill; 1991:322-323. This book provides all the information on how to write an article and supporting sections such as tables, figures, and references. It is nicely broken into four sections with plenty of exercises.
  4. Glantz Stanton. How to summarize data. In: Glantz SA. Primer of Biostatistics. 4th ed.McGraw-Hill; 1997:11-31. A little dry, similar to most textbooks in statistics, but there is a buried gem in there, and that is the software program that comes packaged with it. This statistics program is able to perform many tests that are fundamental to any beginner researcher, before moving on to an advanced package.
  5. Cook D, Meade Maureen, Fink M. How to keep up with the critical care literature and avoid being buried alive. Crit Care Med. 1996;24:1757-1768. The authors provide practical suggestions for avoiding information overload in this high tech era.
  6. Mackowiak P, Wasserman S, Levine M. A critical appraisal of 98.6 F, the upper limit of the normal body temperature, and other legacies of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich. JAMA.1992;268:1578-1580.
  7. Shoemaker A. What's normal?--Temperature, gender, and heart rate. J Statistical Education. 1996;4(2).

    Shoemaker uses the JAMA report (6) as an educational tool. He summarizes the data, and asks some important questions about the results. More importantly, he has compiled the data in an ASCII file format for e-mail allowing the user to insert it in any statistics program for data analysis. The files are available at:

    archive@jse.stat.ncsu.edu

    request the following by e-mail:

    • send jse/data/normtemp.dat
    • send jse/data/normtemp.doc
    • send jse/v4n2/datasets.shoemaker
  8. Nelson E, et al,. Building measurement and data collection into medical practice. Ann Intern Med. 1998;128:460-466.

    Donald Berwick & Thomas Nolan the series Editors for "Physicians as leaders in improving health care" provide us with a glimpse on measurement and data collection. This is an introductory article on incorporating data measurement into physicians' daily practice. Eight principles for using data to support improvement in clinical settings are discussed. Useful and timely series from the Ann Intern Med.

  9. Greenhalgh T. How to read a paper.

    BMJ 1997;315:180-183
    BMJ 1997;315:243-246
    BMJ 1997;315:305-308
    BMJ 1997;315:364-366
    BMJ 1997;315:422-425
    BMJ 1997;315:480-483
    BMJ 1997;315:540-543
    BMJ 1997;315:596-599
    BMJ 1997;315:672-675

    This series of short papers introduces non-experts to finding medical articles and assessing their value in a evidence based fashion.

  10. This is a new web page that houses several powerful resources including the whole text for the famous British Journal of Medicine textbooks "Statistics at Square One" and "Epidemiology for the Uninitiated".

What's New

Contact Information

Michael S. Gold, MD, FACP
Governor, DC Chapter

Chapter Support Staff
Ellen Gold
Phone: 301-770-7227
Fax: 301-984-7998
ellengold4@aol.com