Fundamentals of Medical Research

Most rejected manuscripts were not spoiled in the writing. They were lost at the design stage, months before a word was typed. This course works in the order research actually happens: question first, design second, data third, and writing last.

What the course covers

• Building an answerable question — turning a clinical observation into a structured question with a defined population, comparison and outcome.
• Searching the literature properly — PubMed syntax, MeSH terms, and building a search you can reproduce and report.
• Study designs — case series, cross-sectional, case–control, cohort and randomised trials: what each can and cannot prove, and matching the design to the question.
• Bias and confounding — selection bias, information bias, loss to follow-up, and why an unadjusted comparison between two surgical groups is usually misleading.
• Sample size — why it must be decided before starting, and what an underpowered study actually costs you.
• Practical statistics — choosing the right test, understanding p-values and confidence intervals, survival analysis, and interpreting regression output without overclaiming.
• Ethics and governance — ethical approval, informed consent, patient confidentiality, and trial registration.
• Writing and submitting — the IMRaD structure, writing a discussion that argues rather than repeats, reporting guidelines such as STROBE and CONSORT, choosing a journal, avoiding predatory publishers, and responding to reviewers.

Who it is for

Medical students, postgraduate trainees, and clinicians preparing a thesis or first publication who have been asked to "do some research" without being taught how.

Format

Taught in Arabic, suitable for all levels, and built around worked examples from clinical practice rather than abstract theory.