Illustrated-Understanding And Conducting Clinical Research

This is a shorter version of the book Understanding and Conducting Clinical Research- a Clinical Epidemiology Approach by a Clinician for Clinicians by the author. It is named as an illustrated version because in this book is collected all the tables and diagrams contained in the larger book. The tables and the diagrams are largely self-explanatory, and for better understanding, I have included important texts to support them. These texts are also excerpts from the larger book. It is believed to be able to serve as a quick reference as compared to the larger book, and sufficient for more experienced researchers at a lower cost. Similar to the larger book, parts of this book’s tables and figures have been published in Cureus 2019;11(2):e4112; DOI:10.7759/cureus.4112 entitled Planning and Conducting Clinical Research: The Whole Process.
This booklet uses a slightly different sequence in presenting the content of the research process compared to the larger book. An overview comes early instead of in the last. The Chapter on clinical trials is replaced with a diagram on the phases of clinical trials and a flow chart on the important milestones of a clinical trial. Additionally, references and index are kept to minimum and to those that are essential. There are similar links and QR codes to access PDF slides on related topics throughout the pages in this book.
"It was very easy to make errors” as admitted by John Ioannidis, one of the co-director at the new Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) on the challenges along the research process despite very good intentions of the researchers. Overcoming these challenges and towards building clinical research capacity among the clinicians requires skills, time, effort and funding. Importantly, having grasp the knowledge delineated in this book could avoid wasting in clinical research and contribute to the body of knowledge with less false but accurate evidence. Clinical epidemiology is a relatively new scientific discipline. It has a huge potential and positive impact on clinicians who possess it such as in ability to plan and conduct quality clinical researches, confidence in appraising clinical articles, reviewing study proposals and manuscripts.
It is hoped that this illustrated book would reach wider people and invite more interest in clinical epidemiology, and leading to a more concerted progress in the quality of clinical researches, publications and practices.