Research Tips

Before you start writing your manuscript, decide on which journal you would like to submit your work to. This will help you format your manuscript properly and include all the necessary pieces of information to increase the chances that your manuscript will get accepted. Many researchers actually leave this step until the end of their project, but we recommend that you should start this process as early as possible. In this article, we’ll go over some of the tips and tricks to guide you on how to format your manuscript for some of the common ophthalmology journals.

Months after submitting your manuscript to a journal for publication, you finally get an e-mail from them with a decision. If you’ve done good work and were careful in your review process, then the typical answer would be “accept after revisions.”  For instructions on how to prepare a manuscript for publication, please refer to our previous articles. However, there are times when you are asked to complete additional experiments, or worse, get outright rejected. In this blog, we’ll describe what to expect in the review process and how to handle reviewers’ comments.

After completing your manuscript and choosing which journal to submit your work, the next step is to prepare your work for final submission. If you have never submitted your work to a journal before, then the process can be a bit of a nuisance since there are a lot of checkboxes you’ll have to tick. In this article, we’ll share with you all of the key essential steps that will help streamline your submission process.

After months of hard work of analysis and writing, you are finally ready to submit the results of you investigator initiated trial to a reputable journal. But which one should you submit to? Considering there are tens of thousands of journals, it can be a challenge to select the right one. Many researchers will often leave the decision on which journal to publish with until the very end of the research process; however, this can lead to several problems. Each journal has its own set of requirements for publication, so more often than not, you will have to reformat your manuscript to match the journal’s expectations. In some cases, you may even have to complete additional experiments. So instead of leaving this important decision to end, we recommend that it’s one of the first questions that you answer early on to help save you time and effort later on. In this article, we’ll cover some of the key aspects of selecting the best journal for your study.

Whether you’re writing a manuscript or doing a literature review, you will have to cite and reference your sources. In the past, researchers had to keep track of their references by hand – it’s hard to imagine what a nightmare that was! Thankfully, today there are various options for citation managers to keep track of references and make the entire process more efficient and less stressful. In this article, we’ll cover four of the most commonly used citation managers used in academia – EndNote, Mendeley, RefWorks, and Zotero.

Unless you love writing, drafting a manuscript for your investigator initiated trial (IIT) can be a dreadful task. Where do you even begin? What do you have to include? It’s easy to procrastinate when it comes to writing, but the faster you finish it, the faster you can wrap up your study and move on to the next idea. We find that relying on inspiration tends not to work most of the time, so we recommend following a set template to help you get the job done. In this article, we’ll describe the key sections of a manuscript, what to include, and some tips on making this process as painless as possible.

Whether you’re planning to write a publication on your investigator-initiated trial (IIT) or a review paper, the first step is to perform a literature review. At first, attempting to navigate through the vast ocean of knowledge can seem quite intimidating. Where do you even begin? What information do you need to collect? In this article, we’ll describe some of the key steps that will help you efficiently tackle this process.

Investigator-initiated trials (IIT) are often fairly complex in their methodologies. Additionally, given the large amounts of data, the results from clinical studies can be overwhelmingly difficult to understand. Therefore, it is critical that you’re able to distill your study results in a way that’s easy to understand for your audience. One of the best strategies to summarize and communicate results is through the use of tables and figures. These elements are the first things that readers look for, and it’s also likely the last thing they’ll remember about your study. In this article, we’ll discuss some guidelines that will help you produce effective tables and figures for your studies. 

After long hours of data analysis and statistical tests, you finally determine that the outcome in the treatment group was statistically better than that of the control group. But before you can jump to any conclusions, you first have to determine whether the results are clinically significant. In other words, does it really matter? In this article, we’ll discuss why you should consider both statistical significance and clinical significance in your results analysis. 

Investigator initiated trials are conducted to answer a research question or hypothesis about a general population. Since it would be too expensive and time consuming to test the entire population, we can only sample a portion of the population and hope that the sample is representative. We can use descriptive statistics to describe the sample, and then use inferential statistics, which we will discuss in this article, to make predictions about the entire population.