Research resources

General information and resources for clinical veterinary epidemiological research

A YouTube playlist of talks from the CTSA Clinician-Scientist Training Workshop at UW-Madison, 2021

The NIH Office of Clinical Research provides a FREE online asynchronous course in clinical research; highly recommended.

• They also upload the videos to YouTube, looks like the most recent currently is the 2019 version, as a playlist here

UW Data Science is putting together resources for Data Science and Health Professions, and I kind of like it: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/Data-Science-for-Docs/index.html

• You can click on the topic links for a written version of their notes – I particularly like Excel Hell and Just Enough Statistics
• These pages seem to be a little bit under construction still, but might improve in the future

The Department of Public Health Sciences at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, UK has a very informative (and recommended by NIH) guidebook on statistics for clinical researchers. The pdf can be found here: Statistics Guide for Research Grant Applicants 

The University of Bristol (also in the UK) has developed a “risk of bias” tool to evaluate your study’s risk of bias for lots of different study designs.

Want to Learn R?

Teacup Giraffes and Statistics: online learning modules for coding in R

“A delightful series of modules to learn statistics and R coding for students, scientists, and stats-enthusiasts.”

Recorded Live R for Data Science Classes, by Dr. Bharatendra Rai on YouTube.

Free online textbook R for Data Science

“This book will teach you how to do data science with R: You’ll learn how to get your data into R, get it into the most useful structure, transform it, visualise it and model it. In this book, you will find a practicum of skills for data science. Just as a chemist learns how to clean test tubes and stock a lab, you’ll learn how to clean data and draw plots—and many other things besides. These are the skills that allow data science to happen, and here you will find the best practices for doing each of these things with R. You’ll learn how to use the grammar of graphics, literate programming, and reproducible research to save time. You’ll also learn how to manage cognitive resources to facilitate discoveries when wrangling, visualising, and exploring data.”

Free online self-paced course from Harvard: R Basics

“The first in our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course will introduce you to the basics of R programming.”

Albert Rapp, learn R and data analytics

Plus a nice ggplot tutorial on colors, labels, and making your plots pretty.

Survey Design

Thanks to Haley Uustal (UW-Madison MPH ’23) for this summary.

The following are some tools for how to think about surveys and question design.

NIH IPCCR YouTube video Designing and Testing Questionnaires: a broad overview of ideas and concepts (about 45 min long video)

Two textbooks that are helpful and approachable for constructing surveys. They were easy to flip through and find relevant topics to read more in depth:

• “Designing and conducting health surveys: a comprehensive guide” by Lu Ann Aday and Llewellyn J. Cornelius. [UW Libraries Link]
• “Survey methodology” by Robert M. Groves. [UW Libraries Link]

This is also a good overview to think about survey questions: https://opentextbc.ca/researchmethods/chapter/constructing-survey-questionnaires/

NIH has their PROMIS database which is meant as a database of existing human health measurement tools, but it also offers a helpful framework for how to identify and make measurement tools: https://www.healthmeasures.net/explore-measurement-systems/promis

UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR): Focused on research, education, and training in translational science, ICTR works with multiple schools at UW-Madison (including the SVM) to linked basic research to improvements in human health. There are many resources available through ICTR, including funding opportunities, clinical research resources, and a variety of training programs from videos and workshops to certificates to PhDs.

Burroughs Wellcome Fund grants, for biomedical science at a variety of educational and career stages

NSF Funding Page: https://www.nsf.gov/funding

One Health Commission’s Opportunities page: Education, employment, and funding opportunities for all levels.

Scientific Writing Resources

Writing resources google drive folder

Videos on scientific writing from Ian Baldwin on iBiology

UW-Madison resources:

• UW Libraries develop tools to help students avoid plagiarism
• UW Libraries research tips and tricks modules
• UW Madison Writing Center: Offers free, non-credit workshops for undergrads, graduate and professional students, instructors, faculty, and academic staff. Workshops make it easy to learn and practice new and different approaches to writing—for a variety of writing situations. Browse the listings on their website or handy calendar.
• UW Madison Libraries resource on citation managers: Citation managers are software tools that help you collect, organize, cite, and share references. Anyone working on writing up research projects or case reports, or trying to manage collections of PDFs will benefit from using a citation manager.

How to make a better research poster, faster

Data Visualization

Data visualization resources, from the NCSU Library:

https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/visualization/data-visualization-guides-and-tools

Textbooks and tutorials

Principles of Graphical Excellence, by Edward Tufte (from the Boston University School of Public Health):

http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/DataPresentation/DataPresentation3.html

Fundamentals of Data Visualization, by Claus Wilke:

https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/

How to know when to do what with your data

The Data Visualization Catalog:

https://datavizcatalogue.com/

From Data to Viz:

https://www.data-to-viz.com/index.html

Software and tools for creating infographics (with some nice templates and examples)

https://buffer.com/library/infographic-makers/

A short write up, and 1 hr talk (recorded 2023) by Daniel Bauer, professor of risk and insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business on storytelling with data.

Color palettes

http://www.paletton.com

http://www.colorcodepicker.com – Matches colors from uploaded images and gives you HEX codes

http://colorbrewer2.org – Find the best colors for maps