Many medical courses incorporate a research project within their curriculums. And even if yours doesn’t you need to get your head well and truly around understanding and critiquing research.

Need help? Lucky for the internet.

Planning is key for research projects, and Gantt charts can help you keep everything on track. There are stacks of YouTube tutorials to set them up, but try find one that’s relevant to your Excel version.

You must first download Endnote. It’ll make your life eminently easier. Your uni library will have a free download available. Then you can watch their videos on how to get your research papers into Endnote from pubmed etc, for your literature review.

HEFT EMcast have a video on running a systematic review.

Stats for people who hate stats from Simon Carley… and part 2, for critical appraisal.

Interested in ‘attending’ a twitter journal club? Twitter Journal Club is (as the name may suggest) a Twitter-based journal club. They meet fortnightly on Sunday nights at 8pm UK time (7pm GMT, which makes it 5am Monday morning AEST for keen beaners) to discuss & critique a variety of medical papers, using #TwitJC.

Ready to publish? Consider going open access, by either publishing in an open-access journal or posting your article in your institution’s repository.  Doing so will not only help others by allowing them to read and build upon your work, but it will also help you. Apparently there has been studies that have shown a significant increase in citations (up to 600%) when an article is made openly available rather than locked behind a pay wall.

For an in-depth guide on how to make your work open, visit SPARC. And the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).