Welcome to the a free online course designed by ReFigure team for undergrads, masters and PhD students.
Learning objectives
- Finding scientific papers efficiently: access, search strategies and platforms.
- Learning how to read papers
- Conduct a literature review on a topic of your choice: useful to dive deep into a specific field, for class assignments and Capstone projects.
- Outputs to put on CVs or convince future employers
- Learning about open science
- Learning about innovative tools in science
- Talking science on social media
- Using social media for professional and scientific networking.
The lessons don’t have to be viewed in sequence though later lessons do require some concepts from the earlier ones. You can view the lessons as many times as you like, when you like. The readings, assignments and discussion require 1-5 hours depending on the lesson.
You can view the whole lesson without any registration. However, contact forms are built into the lesson to enable us to offer personalized suggestions on what to read, answering any questions or building a project to have a finite output at the end. For instance, undergraduate Alena chose to do a project with neurogenesis as her research topic.
If you would like to expand your current knowledge on scientific literature research or advance your career plans as a biology student, this course would be very useful for you!
The content was compiled from many sources with the help of many folks. Abby, Dr. Kevin O’Brien, a research at UMass Medical School and I will be working with the participants through the course. Some of the content was taken from Open Science MOOC. Thanks to Porcia Vaughn, the biosciences librarian at University of Texas for her suggestions. Feedback on the course.
