This information is made available to intercalating BScs so that you can see what students entering Year 4 at Imperial will have done in their second year, to enable you to review the same material. The Science and Patient course runs in the second year of the medical school course and is an important foundation to the BSc. It also prepares students for clinical work in year 3, and also fosters some critical appraisal.
Critical appraisal applies both to basic science and clinical medicine. Students need to decide for themselves whether the conclusions drawn from evidence that may be presented in a publication are acceptable. This course both enables students to review clinical data and science with a critical eye, but also is the beginning of encouraging some of you to become clinical scientists of the future.
One major focus of the course is to the ensure students able to review the literature and interpret data and statistics that appear in papers. By the end of the course, students will be able to review literature with confidence, and also will have written up a practical in the form of a publication, and hence will have some experience of actually writing a publication.
The Science and Patient course covered :
- Understanding of the fundamental principles and practice of scientific research
- Critically reviewing scientific literature
- Analysing and interpreting data, using relevant statistics where appropriate
- Understanding of the concept of developing and testing a hypothesis
- Understanding of the principles of experimental design
- Understanding of the concept of plagiarism and how to avoid it
- Experiencing written scientific communication
- Training in and use of REFWORKS as a reference manager database for writing a paper.
It is planned that training in use of REFWORKS will be available to intercalating students will be included in the induction sessions you when you arrive.
The following lectures are therefore relevant in your pre-reading before attending your intercaleted BSc course.
| Title | Lecturer |
|---|---|
| Critical appraisal of the literature [ppt] | Professor Mike Ferenczi |
| Ethics, research on humans and publishing [ppt] | Professor Karim Meeran |
| Ethical issues associated with the use of experimental animals [ppt] | Professor Dominic Wells |
| Professor Mike Ferenczi | |
| Study skills and essay writing [ppt] and lecture handout [Word] | Professor Barbara Bain |
| Measurement in Science Bioassays and Immunoassays [ppt] | Professor Karim Meeran |
| Basic statistics: a survival guide [ppt] | Professor Tom Sensky |
| Understanding the scientific literature [ppt] | Professor David Lane |
| Here are two papers the Imperial students used to practice journal review. The topics are not particularly relevant to you but integrated well with what students were being taught at the time (Diabetes and Hypertension) | |
| Subcutaneous glucagon-like peptide-1 improves postprandial glycaemic control over a 3-week period in patients with early Type 2 diabetes [pdf] |
Jeannie F. Todd, C. Mark B. Edwards, Mohammad A. Ghatei, Hugh M. Mather & Stephen R. Bloom |
| A forced titration study of antihypertensive efficacy of candesartan cilexetil in comparison to losartan: CLAIM Study II [pdf] |
DG Vidt, WB White, E Ridley, M Rahman, S Harris, J Vendetti, EL Michelson, R Wang, & CLAIM Study investigators |