Posted: December 17th, 2014

writing blog

writing blog

General guidance on writing blog entries
Choice of Article
You need to comment on primary research articles. If you are in any doubt as to whether an
article should be considered primary research, look and see whether it has a methods
section. If it does not, it is almost certainly not primary research. Laboratory studies and
clinical trials make excellent choices. You could also comment on systematic reviews and
meta-analyses, however, the methods used in these types of publications are quite complex
(including complex statistics) and may be difficult to summarise in a short blog entry.
Studies which test an explicit hypothesis perhaps lent themselves more easily to critical
analysis in comparison to observational studies which look at trends in diseases or
prescribing.
The inspiration for your blog entries can come from anywhere: you might read about a
study in the newspaper and decide to find the original paper in an academic journal. You
might come across paper during your background reading for the module. At some point,
you will have to use an academic database. I will recommend the names of some below, and
I would encourage you to become familiar with them and to discover which ones you find
most easy-to-use. They’re very powerful search tools, and allow you to filter the results by
date, or by type of article (for instance you might want to restrict your search to clinical
trials only).
Pubmed
Scopus
ScienceDirect
Web of Knowledge
You may know of others, and are welcome to use them. in addition the University has its
own search tool which is called ‘Discover’ and is particularly helpful, because it helps you
find articles which are available in the universities electronic library collection.
The purpose of my own blog www.cardiovascularnews.co.uk is to highlight areas of interest
and relevant articles to you, rather than to provide model blog entries.
Structure of your blog entry
You can structure your blog entry however you see fit, hoever you should include the
following information:
Introduction
You should briefly describe the purpose and aims of the study you are describing.
Remember your audience is GPs and pharmacists. You shouldn’t need to give long
explanations of common medical conditions. Remember that the marks are awarded for
your description and critical analysis of the research.
Description of methods
Think carefully about including the most important details in the methods, because you will
not be able to include all the details. You should include details of the the experimental
protocol, but do not forgot to mention what was measured (and how) and what the primary
end point of the study was (or which value was compared between groups.). As your critical
analysis is largely dependent on the methods, it is important to make clear how the
experiment was conducted.
Description of results
It is important to discuss the most important results quantitatively and to consider the most
important information to include in a short summary. Don’t be tempted to write too much
about statistical significance, without commenting on the size of the effect measured. Many
papers will include lots of measurements, you need to consider which are the most
important, as you won’t have room to discuss them all.
Critical analysis
This is probably the most difficult section (and consequently, where the most marks are
available). Essentially, you should aim to consider the work critically, rather than simply
accepting the authors’ conclusion. You can approach this task by asking questions such as:
Were the methods (and endpoints) appropriate? What do the results mean? Is the authors’
interpretation of the results supported by the data?
You should try to judge each paper on its own merits. If a paper set out to test the
hypothesis that ‘dogs enjoy eating bones’ it’s not really fair to criticise it for not asking
whether cats like eating bones. Proposing an extension to a study (however interesting) is
not critical analysis. You may wish, briefly, to discuss the implications of the research which
is again interesting but is not critical analysis.
Try to keep your critical analysis specific rather than general for example, rather than
automatically saying ‘the experiment would have been better if the sample size had been
bigger’ consider whether this is really the case. In very may experiments it is true, but it
requires some justification. Experimenters don’t usually pick a sample size (n number) out of
thin air, they will perform calculations to work out the sample size they need. A trial that is
bigger than it needs to be costs more money and may have ethical implications relating to
unnecessary experimentation on volunteers or animals. A comment along the lines of ‘the
authors don’t state how they calculated their sample size’ or ‘the authors calculated their
sample size but were not able to recruit enough volunteers’ is a much more useful
indication that something is wrong.
It is important to comment on bias e.g. ‘there were more people with hypertension in the
control group than the test group’ and to think carefully about critical analysis of the
measurements and endpoints used in the trial. Many studies will claim that drug x reduces
cardiovascular risk, when in fact they have only measured the effect of drug x on blood
pressure, not on cardiovascular events. If a trial uses the ‘Penson depression score’ as its
endpoint, you need to question what this score is? What does it mean? Has it been
validated in other trials? What are its strengths and weaknesses?. Some experiments don’t
seem to have a clear hypothesis and don’t state the primary endpoint in the methods. This
is often the case with trials involving mental health where the patients will be assessed for
severity of symptoms using 4 or 5 different scales before and after an intervention. You
should be asking if it is necessary to use so many scales , or whether the authors were
‘hedging their bets’ and hoping they would see a significant difference in at least one of the
measurements.
It is also interesting to comment on the way in which numerical data are treated. For
example, Some trials of antihypertensives set out arbitrary categories for BP (ie
normal<140/90<hypertensive) and then presented their results saying ‘at the end of the
trial 20% of people in the control group were hypertensive and 10% of people in the
treatment group were hypertensive’ When data is categorised like this, it is a good idea to
ask why? Is there a good reason? Or would it have been better to present the mean BP in
each group? You may find it helpful to commented on the statistics used in published work.
Often these are very ropy!
These are by no means the only things you can comment on, but hopefully they give some
food for thought.
Avoidance of plagarism
All blog entries will be subjected to analysis by plagiarism detection software. Students
deemed to have committed plagiarism in either the formative or the summative blog entries
will be initially invited to an interview with the module leader, and where appropriate, will
be referred to an Academic Misconduct Panel. It is inevitable that in a short article such as
this, there will be some similarity with the source paper you have used, however you nut be
very careful to avoid crossing the line of what is acceptable. The University gives excellent
advice on the avoidance of plagiarism which includes one definition that is very helpful:
Plagarism is..’ Verbatim copying or close paraphrasing of another’s work without clear
identification and acknowledgement’ This means that whilst ‘copying and pasting’ is clearly
unacceptable, so too is taking an original piece of work and altering the grammar and
changing words using a thesaurus to make something ‘new’. Indeed, this may be construed
as an attempt to conceal plagiarism, in which case the penalties are made mere severe.
In order to write a blog entry about a piece of research, you should know the paper ‘insideout’ and understand it. My strong advice would be to try to write the blog entry without the
paper in front of you. You will obviously need to check figures and details, but this approach
should help you to avoid any allegations of academic misconduct, for which the sanctions
are very serious. University advice regarding academic misconduct and plagarism can be
found here: http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/studysupport/81924.htm

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