Suggested blog topics

Posted on 29th November 2022 by Emma Carter

Our student bloggers are welcome to blog about any topic or issue related to evidence-based healthcare that interests them. However, if you’re thinking of blogging for Students 4 Best Evidence, and are unsure where to start, below are a list of suggested topics you might like to choose from.  

Browse under the headings of: tutorials, issues and debates within evidence-based healthcare, health in the media, and reviews of resources, and then email us before you start your blog so we can make sure no-one else has already chosen that topic!

Tutorials

• How do you interpret a survival curve?
• What is a ‘scoping’ review?
• How are effects on health equity assessed in systematic reviews? (a list of suggested resources is available on this topic
• Who was Archie Cochrane?
• How to navigate a Cochrane Review: a guide for beginners
• How might patients be involved in prioritising research (An example is the James Lind Alliance)
• What is a ‘ROC’ curve (receiver operator characteristics)?
• What do we do when we can’t randomize?
• What are ‘measures of effect’ and ‘measures of impact’?
• What is ‘statistical interaction’ and biological interaction’?
• What are the principles of data management and presentation in health research? How to present data effectively?
• Qualitative research methodology (choose an area to present)
• The art of communicating and presenting science
• Tips for writing an academic article
• Tips for designing an effective conference poster (draft in progress)

Issues and debates within evidence-based healthcare

• Careful, Kind, and Sustainable Care. This important topic was discussed in a tweetchat in March 2023. One question debated was “What is the role of EBM in achieving careful, kind, and sustainable care?”. What are you thoughts on this? There are lots of resources and discussion available in the linked twitter thread.
• What evidence-based healthcare currently is vs. what it should be (in an ideal, but not necessarily unrealistic, world).
• Is there enough emphasis on teaching evidence-based healthcare at University? What are your experiences of the integration of EBHC within your course?
• Most randomised trials are bad and most trials participants will be in one. This statement is taken from a paper investigating the ongoing issue of bad health research. This needs to stop, but how?
• With the continuing popularity of patients seeking health information online, how does this impact the patient-physician relationship? It’s important to understand the implications of this and this systematic review is a good starting point for the debate.
• Retractions (withdrawals) of journal articles are increasing (more than the publication rate of articles is increasing). Moreover, misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. But how do some researchers get away with malpractice for so long and what is being done to tackle the issue? (See retractionwatch.com – a website keeping track of the authors who have had the highest number of retractions (e.g. for falsifying data)).
• The role (and responsibility of!) the media for disseminating research to policy-makers, practitioners and patients.
• The perverse incentives (publication, funding, promotion) in academia to produce positive results.
• ‘Making people sick in the pursuit of medicine’. The problems and harms associated with over-treatment (from over-detection, to over-diagnosis, to over-treatment).

Health in the media series

We’re also looking for students to continue our ‘health in the media‘ series, looking at the claims made in the media about various interventions and evaluating whether these claims are true to the evidence.

Reviews of resources

You could also choose to write a short, informal review of a learning resource, giving feedback on how useful you find them. You can find more information on this on our ‘Library‘ page.

If you have any questions at all, please email Emma Carter at: general@students4bestevidence.net

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