Course No.: PP624
Course Title: Research Methods

Dr. Perle's Home page

 

Syllabus

Capstone Project

The following forms are all in MS Word format

Capstone Project Guidelines

D.C. Capstone Advisor Assignment Form

Senior Paper contract

Research Project contract

Thesis Committee Invitation Acceptance Form

Examples

Here are examples of a completed Senior Paper Initial Proposal a Research Track Initial Proposal, an Introduction to a literature review and an Introduction to a research thesis
All of these are in PDF format.

Links

All the links below when clicked on will open into a new window.

Instructions for authors - from the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Theraputics which is the basis of our Capstone "suitable for publication" standard.

Searching the literature

For basic information FreeBooks4Doctors has many free full-text medical text books on-line.

Medline (PubMed) is the National Library of Medicine's searchable bibliographic database of biomedical literature. This service is free. Note the only chiropractic publications indexed by Pubmed is Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics and Chiropractic History (which is from the Association for Chiropractic History)

Another searchable bibliographic database is the Index to Chiropractic Literature. Which covers 44 chiropractic journals cover to cover starting in 1985. This is free from the Chiropractic Library Consortium (CLIBCON) and does not require any type of password. There is a recent (2006) upgrade to ICL that has really made this an outstanding bibliographic database for chiropractic researchers.

Manual, Alternative and Natural Therapy (MANTIS ) is a searchable bibliographic (citation & abstract) database that provides coverage for health care disciplines not significantly represented in the major biomedical databases. This is paid for by U.B.C.C. for your use. If you have not signed up already please contact a librarian or Dr. Perle for instructions on how to get an account.

To search for free published dissertations published between 2000-1 search UMI's web site.

PubCrawler PubCrawler is a free "alerting" service that scans daily updates to Medline (PubMed) databases. PubCrawler can keep you informed of the current contents of Medline, by listing new database entries that match your research interests.

The Magnus Wahlstrom Library at the University of Bridgeport has many other resources that will be helpful for you. Some can be accessed from their web page and others you will have to go to the library for. Many of these databases require that you have a University e-mail account. So even if you are using some non-University ISP (e.g., AOL) you should sign up for a UBNet account. To do so go to UBNet. On the menu on the left click on New UBNet Account and follow the directions. You'll need your student ID number.

For information on the best internet search engines this site is always up to date. Right now the best search engine for the web is Google.com

Writing

When writing a thesis you will need to use the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (AKA Vancouver format) for citing your references.

The Editors of Chiropractic and Osteopathy have produced some guidelines on good scientific writing to assist authors when preparing a manuscript for submission to the journal. This is a short guideline that will be very helpful

Guidelines on Style for Scientific Writing- a well done guide to scientific writing in general. Regardless of whether you are doing a thesis or a senior paper this is worth reading..

How to Write a Literature Review- a well done guide to writing a literature review. Again it does not matter which type of paper you are doing either way there is a literature review involved.

Systematic Review

Here are some sources of information on writing a systematic review

Introduction To Systematic Reviews from the School of Health and Related Research at University of Sheffield, UK

The Cochrane Collaboration open learning material

Case Reports

A guide to writing a case report (in pdf)

Statistics

A good basic and searchable site with information on statistics can be found at Sportsci.org, The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice, Statsoft, & STATS - STeve's Attempt to Teach Statistics (not me!)

Calculating the number of subjects needed for a survey can be done on this Sample Calculator or for other types of studies here is a free power calculator, G*Power

Simple statistics calculator QuickCalcs

A more advanced statistics calculator StatCrunch

Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the protetion of human research subjects

All human studies projects need IRB approval. University of Bridgeport IRB

For more infomation on ethics in research please see:

Office for Human Research Protections - All the regulations concerning protection for human subjects in research can be found here

Evidence Based Practice

This site maintains a list (in PDF format) of evidence based practice resources and a top 20 list (also a PDF)

 

Updated: January 27 2009