Clinical Research Handbook

Through clinical research, field changing ideas are formulated, tested, and ultimately translated into clinical practice with the goal of improving healthcare for generations to come.

From a practical perspective, there is a need for medical students both in the United States, and internationally, to be exposed to clinical research in their medical education. In the United States, many students are encouraged to perform research in medical school for the overall advancement of the field, and also to become competitive for the medical residency match process. The latter point has become even more important over the past two years as Step 1 has recently become pass/fail, and thus many students are turning to research to become competitive candidates in their field of interest.

However, often in the clinical environment, academic mentors are often busy and, in some medical schools, difficult to find. Therefore, students in these situations need a written resource that describes how to perform research for junior medical professionals. Internationally, some medical students may have difficulty finding mentors in guiding them to perform effective clinical research. Therefore, in: The Clinical Research Handbook, the authors attempt to provide a concise and effective reading that allows individuals to gain introductory knowledge in performing clinical research. We completely describe the process of research by describing how to formulate ideas, test these ideas, and submit these ideas as publishable manuscripts to journals.

Specifically, we cover many key concepts such as:

• Reading relevant peer-reviewed literature.
• Formulating novel hypotheses.
• Formatting and writing a manuscript.
• Describing different types of data sources such as institutional datasets and many national databases.
• Describing how to take data and perform statistical analysis using prominent packages of RStudio, and we additionally provide basic source code.
• Discuss the creation of online predictive calculators which are becoming even more common in literature today.
• Discuss an introduction to intellectual property and grant writing.

Where possible, we take all opportunities to explain these subjects in non-technical and easy to understand terms, and each chapter is designed to be read as a unique individual reading in an effort to save time for the reader. Since this is primarily aimed at individuals that are junior in their career, we aim to make this reading as low of a cost as possible. Using our book, medical students will be able to go from formulating ideas to accepted publication by using all of the information provided here.