Medical Reading

To form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with the available scientific articles in that field. And to be able to read research papers effectively, you have to be willing and able to read the scientific articles for yourself. Reading and understanding scientific papers is a skill that every single pharmaceutical industry or medical device professional, researcher, health care professional, doctor, and scientist should have learned during graduate school. You can have learnt it too, but like any skill, it takes perseverance and practice to be maintained.

The fast-evolving world of clinical research and the new media available have highly increased the number of scientific articles available; this does not always mean better scientific paper’s quality. The growing volume of journals and editors has deeply changed the environment of research papers: What professionals learnt during their studies has become, probably, not true anymore.

Reading a scientific paper is a completely different process from reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper. Reading research papers may take you a very long time. The process will go much faster as you gain the right techniques and experience.

The course aims to provide the tools to

• understand the environment of medical-scientific communication;

• evaluate the quality of scientific articles and clinical studies using a systematic approach.