Life in the Lab, the essential guide to becoming a researcher
Life in the Lab, the essential guide to becoming a researcher
Experimental design, conducting research, data analysis and statistics, and writing up your work for publication
About the Book
My goal for this book was to create a useful resource for people embarking on a research career. The one book that every supervisor would hope their team would have read. As such, I have included all the different aspects of life as a researcher from before you begin right through to publishing high-quality papers. The content should be deep enough to be useful but accessible and entertaining enough for it not to be boring or hard to read.
The contents of this book are intended to lay sound foundations for all the main aspects of being a successful scientist. However, one guide book can’t tell you everything. Your supervisors, lab mates, mentors and lecturers will all build on the foundations. You will also need to go deeper into your project-specific areas but, hopefully, by reading this book everything else should be a bit easier to learn. If I have done a good job, those massive statistics, experimental design or other complicated textbooks will all be less painful
About the Author
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Before you Begin
1.1 About this book
1.2 Choosing a Project
1.3 Applying for a Research Position
1.4 Starting a New Project
1.5 Information Gathering
Chapter 2: Experimental Design
2.1 Project design 35
2.2 Experiment Design Preliminaries
2.3 Correlative or Manipulative?
2.4 Measurements
2.5 Controls
2.6 Independence and Randomisation
2.7 Sample Size Calculations
2.8 Experimental Design – Final Checks
Chapter 3: Life in the Lab
3.1 Research Ethics
3.2 Tips for Lab Life
3.3 Time Management
3.4 Lab Books
3.5 Data Management
Chapter 4: Processing Data
4.1 Data Analysis
4.2 Data processing
4.3 How to Deal with Outliers
4.4 Inferential Statistics: Testing for Significance
4.5 Writing About Statistics
Chapter 5: Graphs, Tables and Figures
5.1 Figure Preparation
5.2 Tables
5.3 Graphs
5.4 Figure Legends / Captions
Chapter 6: Writing
6.1 General Writing Tips:
6.2 Microsoft Word tips and tricks
6.3 Notes on Scientific Publishing
6.4 Literature Reviews and Review articles
6.5 Referencing
6.6 Writing for the Public
Chapter 7: Writing Papers
7.1 Steps to a Quality Paper
7.2 The Title Page
7.3 Choosing an Effective Title
7.4 Scientific Abstracts
7.5 Introductions
7.6 Materials and Methods
7.7 Results Sections
7.8 Discussions
Chapter 8: Editing
8.1 Editing Stage I: Document-Level
8.2 Editing Stage II - Paragraphs
8.3 Editing Stage III: Sentences
8.4 Editing Stage IV: Word Choice
8.5 Editing Stage V: Final Checks
Chapter 9: Talks and Posters
9.1 Talks
9.2 Posters
Chapter 10: Resources
10.1 Specific Materials and Methods Sections
10.2 Experimental Design Checklist
10.3 Statistics Tests Flow Chart
10.4 Choosing A Graph
10.5 Manuscript Preparation Checklist
10.6 Figure Preparation Checklist
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