QMedCONNECT December 2017: How does an ORCID id help an author? Read about the 7 deadly sins in a research paper

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: December 2017

Dear friends

A Happy New Year to all of you! At the end of 2017, I thought it would be nice to share a reflection of the year gone by. We delivered 34 lectures (some of which were guest lectures on themes), and conducted 23 workshops. As I always say, this was good, but we would like the number of workshops to be much higher - ideally around 50 a year. We started the 100 PGs initiative in Jan 2017, where we raised funds to subsidize workshops plus mentoring for 100 PG students for their theses. We have been able to finish the workshops for 47 so far, and still need to conduct them for more. Several factors contributed to the slow progress. One was the residents strike in March, then the availability of venues with good Internet connections, and the availability of PGs on days other than Sundays. We are hopefully working towards completing the numbers this year, at the earliest.

Other important events in 2017 were:

1. Two representatives from GlobalGiving, USA, where we raise funds for QMed, visited our office and also the KEM Hospital where the Dean, Dr Avinash Supe, some faculty members and students talked to them, and conveyed their appreciation of QMed's work.

2. I attended the Annual Conference of the Medical Library Association, USA which is an event for lots of learning and updates

3. I gave special lectures at an event organized by the BMJ, the Annual Conference of the Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and some more

4. QMeds's PubMed workshop went International - in collaboration with The Union, we conducted the first International Workshop at Mandalay, Myanmar

5. And finally, at the end of 2017, we incorporated the Danamojo - a payment solutions platform for Fundraising on our website. For Indian donors, the process of giving a donation is now really simple. One can donate using a debit or credit card, do a bank transfer or even have a cheque picked up - just by filling in details on the Danamojo platform. The debit and credit card options will work for International donors too, but we recommend that these donors use the GlobalGiving option.
Do go to our updated Donation Page to see both options. For those in India, do try the Danamojo option. You will make a fresh start in helping medical students and researchers learn about searching for evidence, for 2018

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Did You Know

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)

Have you ever tried to search articles by a particular author name, and discover that there are 10 more authors who have the same name? Let us try searching for Wang H as an author in PubMed. We get over 60000. It is fairly obvious that one individual "Wang H" could not have written so many articles and there may be several individuals with this name.

This is just one issue about searching for an author's work. There are many more problems. To name a few, some women's names change after marriage. In some cultures there is no family name, just one or more initials and a first name. In some journals an author may have submitted his/her name this way. In some others, with the insistence on a last name, the author may have given a last name Overall there may be lots of problems with author names, and so finding one individual's publications is not really easy.

The solution is "ORCID", it solves the author name problem by giving individuals a unique, 16-digit numeric permanent identification number. (People in India could relate this to the Aadhaar number or PAN)

There are several other reasons which makes it worth using - registering for an ORCID number is completely free. Whether you write a book or a journal article or several different types of publications, your ORCID id works. Your ORCID registration includes privacy control features. You can connect your ORCID id with various research websites and most importantly many Journals, funders & institutions are moving towards ORCID.

Get your unique ORCID identifier Register now!

Interesting Reading

Picho, K., & Artino, A. R. 7 Deadly Sins in Educational Research. J Grad Med Educ. 2016 Oct; 8(4): 483–487.

In recent times, research publishing became an important part in almost all educational disciplines. However, the process behind writing a research paper is not natural to most of us (Hudelson & Perneger, 2004) and hence requires proper learning and teaching effort. The absence of proper teaching, training and monitoring of research process leads to some common pitfalls, which then raises the question of validity of the research. This editorial with the purpose of creating awareness about these mistakes and to encourage better research outcome, focuses on what the authors term as “7 deadly sins” in educational research. These sins are as follows:

Sin 1: The Curse of the Handicapped Literature Review

Sin 2: Inadequate Power

Sin 3: Ignoring the Importance of Measurement

Sin 4: Using the Wrong Statistical Tool

Sin 5: Merciless Torture of Data and Other Questionable Analysis Practices

Sin 6: Slavery to the P Value

Sin 7: Lack of Transparency in Reporting Results and Maintaining Raw Data

Click For Detailed Blog Post

Click For Full Text

From QMed's Calendar

Talks on Literature Search / Referencing & Citing at

• YMT College of Homeopathy - Dec 6

• YMT Ayurveda Medical College & Hospital - Dec 7

Workshop at MGM Dental College

• MGM Dental College, Navi Mumbai organised two days Research Methodology Workshop for students and faculty members. The workshop included Hands on training on Mastering PubMed, Reference Management using Mendeley & using Cochrane Library databases. The second day had a more detailed session on the use of the Advanced Search options in PubMed, to build a search strategy for a Systematic Review. This workshop was held on 13 & 14 Dec. Thirty enthusiastic participants made this session very interactive and interesting.