· Home  · Overall Schedule   · Courses  · Programs  · Rosters  · Career Awards

OBJECTIVES

The ATCR Seminar plays a crucial role in your research training. It is a chance to have your work intensively critiqued by a group of interested peers and helps bring together in practical situations the theoretical topics covered in other parts of ATCR. It also gives you experience critiquing others' work, which will be a regular task in your professional activities. Thus, it will familiarize you with the very important informal peer review process - a linchpin of quality research. The Fall Quarter is dedicated to review of protocols created in the Summer Designing Clinical Research Course. The Winter and Spring Quarters are used to discuss the implementation of your work, including your questionnaires, abstracts, manuscripts, or new protocols.

Hence, the objectives for the seminar are for scholars to:

1. Demonstrate the ability to critically review work-in-progress by other colleagues/investigators.
2. Demonstrate skill in presenting one's own clinical research projects to colleagues.

PREREQUISITES

Designing Clinical Research (Epi 202).

FACULTY

FORMAT

Susan Buchbinder, Mark Pletcher, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo will lead separate sections.

Participation

We welcome participation by all ATCR scholars. In the past, those scholars based in settings with multiple division/departmental interactions similar to the ATCR Seminar (e.g., the VA General Internal Medicine Fellowship) sometimes found the WIP redundant. If you are in that situation, you can apply to opt out after the first 6 sessions (i.e., opt out for Winter and Spring)-- send Mark an email by October 29. We will note that in the past even scholars who had ample Work-in-Progress seminars within their own departments felt that the non-threatening atmosphere of the ATCR Seminar was beneficial to their learning.

Presentation scheduling

Everyone should expect to present at least twice and be a primary reviewer at least twice.

The Fall sessions will be mainly to review protocols from the Summer Clinical Research Workshop. If you can't make one or more of these sessions, especially if you're scheduled to present or review, please notify your section leader right away. After the schedule is set, it will be the scholar's responsibility to switch with a colleague when conflicts arise.

We'll set up the Winter-Spring presentation schedule soon after the Fall begins.

Content of sessions

Sessions will generally include 2 reviews of protocols or other materials.

The initial 5-6 sessions are for Designing Clinical Research protocols. After these initial sessions, scholars should present research or products they are actively developing, which may include (but are not limited to) new protocols (complete or partial), abstracts, manuscripts, grants, and other research products, based on presenter needs. The presenter should include a brief cover memo with specific questions/areas of focus, especially if submitting a large volume of materials for review by the group.

The review process structure is as follows:

• The primary reviewer does just 5 minutes of review, including: a brief (ideally one sentence) summary and then a critique focusing on 3-5 important issues.
  Since everyone's read the protocol, there is no need to describe it in detail, and doing so decreases time for the critiquing. Additional issues and minor edits can be addressed in writing and as time allows in discussion.
• The section leaders guide the group discussion, starting with eliciting major comments from other fellows, providing an opportunity for the presenter to respond to major comments, and then working through the protocol.
• Everyone writes comments, on the protocol or typed up, to give to the author.
• If you cannot attend a session, you are still responsible for providing written comments, which should be e-mailed to the presenter and your section leader.

Logistics

The author must distribute the protocol to the group by e-mail a minimum of 1 week prior to the session date. Please provide all materials electronically.

We look forward to seeing you in the ATCR Seminar!

GRADING

Grades are Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory and will be based on attendance and participation.

ENROLLMENT

This course is restricted to those enrolled in the Advanced Training in Clinical Research Certificate Program (ATCR).