Course Material

Workshop 1: Organising and structuring a project

One of the most important research skills that universities often fail to teach relates to project organisation. How should you name your files? Where should you keep your files? What can you do to make sure that your files are easy to find later? And how can you make it easier on someone else (or future you!) to make sense of what you’ve created? In this workshop, I’ll provide some practical tips for how to think about these questions.


Workshop 2: An introduction to data visualisation

Data visualisation is a fundamental research task that is necessary in almost every field of scientific work. The human visual system is a powerful information processing tool, and in practice scientists rely heavily on figures and graphs to make sense of data they have collected. The second workshop serves two purposes: first, it provides a very gentle introduction to R (assumes no previous experience with R!) and second, it helps get you started using ggplot2, an powerful tool for data visualisation.


Workshop 3: An introduction to R markdown

Most of us learn how to write documents using word processing software, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. There are some good reasons why people do this, mostly because they are user friendly and convenient tools. However, there are some disadvantages to these tools. The third workshop in this course introduces a simple way to write scientific documents in plain text files, using a convention known as “markdown”. I’ll first explain why markdown is such a useful approach to writing documents, and then introduce an extension called “R markdown” that allows you to incorporate data analysis code into the document itself. As a side benefit, knowledge of R markdown is useful for other professional purposes: this website, for example, is written using R markdown!


Workshops 4-6: Systematic review

With the explosive growth in the scientific literature in the 21st century, sytematic review is an increasingly useful tool. It is concerned with the discovery, collation, critique and synthesis of subject areas that have multiple studies investigating the same underlying phenomenon. The goals of systematic review can include: making sense of conflicting findings, informing public policy, and identifying gaps in the literature. This three part workshop by Dr Matt Modini will lead you through the process of conducting a systematic review, covering such topics as meta-analysis, narrative review, meta-review, and more