Early Stage

Are you at the beginning of your PhD project and do you want to enhance your search strategies? Come and learn how to search and find the academic information in your chosen field more effectively!

During this workshop you will learn:
• how to explore the academic information resources relevant for your research
• how to assess the retrieved information
• how to stay up-to-date in your project
• how to use the basics of bibliometrics in order to underpin your research
• and how to publish in scientific journals.

First you will get some theoretical instructions before we focus on practical trainings in your chosen field.

Trainer:
Dr. Diana Klein is the subject librarian for medicine, chemistry and pharmacy at the University Library of Würzburg. She is also responsible for journal management and open access publishing.

Seminar description
PhD students and postdocs have to give arguments in many different contexts: in their publications, in grant applications, in lab meetings and in conference presentations. Nevertheless, the bases for strong and correct arguments are not always fully clear to them. Logic provides extremely helpful tools for scientists to develop their arguments in a coherent, well-structured and convincing way. The seminar gives an introduction to the most important concepts of logic: premises and conclusions of arguments, validity and soundness of arguments, deductive vs. inductive reasoning, common types of inferences and fallacies. The idea of the seminar is to use these concepts as a toolbox which provides very useful techniques for everyday scientific work. The participants learn how to reconstruct arguments from scientific texts, how to give well-structured and logically valid arguments, and how to avoid misunderstandings. There are two main sets of exercises: one for written argumentation and one for oral argumentation.

Contents
• basic concepts of logic (validity and soundness or arguments etc.)
• inductive and deductive arguments
• common types of fallacies
• reconstructing arguments from texts
• tips and exercises for written argumentation
• tips and exercises for oral argumentation

The participants...
• state their arguments in a precise and logically coherent way
• learn to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of arguments
• learn how to break-down arguments into their logical structure
• train analytical thinking

Methods
The methods are interactive throughout. The course provides extensive exercises that aim at the application of the acquired skills to the participants’ individual fields of work. The participants can bring their own texts to the seminar and get the chance to apply the acquired methods directly to topics from their own research.

Note: Registration of GSLS doctoral researchers has priority to non-GSLS participants. Non-GSLS participants pay a service and workshop fee of EUR 50 by bank transfer.

Giving shape to your ideas
Writing can be a painful process, especially if nothing less than your academic career depends on the text to be written. All academic writing is about more than just your research findings. Besides the content, every author has at least two other aspects to deal with. First, language. Of course you want to write in a clear, concise and elegant manner. However, the sentences you produce sound awkward and clumsy. Your mind is filled with great ideas, but whenever you write some-thing down, it is a world away from the perfectly crafted language in the articles of the journals you read. Second, the process. Whenever you sit down to actually write something, you get a ris-ing feeling of panic. The amount of work to be done seems so overwhelming that you immediately switch to another task like tidying up or sorting your books by color.

Workshop style
In this workshop, we will discuss what characterizes academic writing in your discipline and what constitutes good style. You will find out how to continuously improve your writing skills and how to organize your writing process. We will talk about writing, reflect on our own writing habits, share successful strategies with each other and work with our own and others’ texts.

• types of writers and writing strategies
• characteristics of academic language
• the elements of good style
• giving and receiving text feedback

Please bring with you a piece of your own academic writing, about 5 pages long – an excerpt is fine –and definitely a work-in-progress rather than a finished product.

Trainer
Dr. Dzifa Vode is a graduate translator (Diplom-Übersetzerin FH, University of Applied Sciences Mu-nich, 2007). Freelance translator (since 1999) and writer’s coach (since 2008). Lecturer at the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences, Nürnberg (since 2009). Trainer for academic writing, public speaking, and university teaching (since 2009).

Note: Registration of GSLS doctoral researchers has priority to non-GSLS participants. Non-GSLS participants pay a service and workshop fee of EUR 50 by bank transfer.

Day 1: Introduction and statistical basics

• Structure of Prism
• Project types and workflow
• First examples (Column and XY project)
• Focus on graph creation and workflow
• Example and exercise: data import

Day 2: Introduction and statistical basics - continuation

• Statistics basics
• Population and sample
• Descriptive statistics
• Example: Descriptive statistics and error bars (SD, SEM, CI)
• Hypothesis testing: Idea, workflow, interpretation
• Example and exercise: group comparison via t-test and alternative procedures

Day 3: Data analysis with Prism

All topics with example and exercise in the software

• Group comparisons (One Factor - Column Project)
• ANOVA: idea, interpretation, prerequisites
• Post-Hoc Tests (Multiple Comparisons)
• Alternative methods
• Dependent Measures: Repeated Measures ANOVA
• Group Comparisons (Multiple Factors - Grouped Project)
• Two-Way ANOVA: Idea, Interpretation, Special Features
• Overview of group comparisons: When to use which test?

Day 4: Data analysis with Prism - continuation

• Curve Fitting Regression
• Basics, linear regression
• Linear vs. non-linear regression
• Curve fitting using the example of dose-response
• Optional or desired topics
• Special analysis methods (e.g. logistic regression)
• Other project types (e.g. survival)
• Processing and discussion of own questions

The main focus of this workshop will be on using the Python scikit-image package.

scikit-image is a collection of algorithms for image processing. It is available free of charge and free of restriction.

Participants should be familiar with Python and ideally have already participated in a Software Carpentry workshop.

In many research groups projects by Bachelor’s and Master’s students are supervised on a daily or weekly basis by PhD students. Often side projects of the own PhD topic form essential parts of the BSc/MSc work and it is expected by the group leaders to supervise in an adequate manner.

This seminar wants to:

• Provide the legal background for supervision by PhD students
• Show methods and communication tools to productively address the above problems
• Give advice how to solve problems in these tasks
• Make clear what kind and extent of supervision can/should be expected by the BSc or MSc student
• And show how and in which way a PhD student can benefit from supervision

Methods
The exchange of experience and problem-solving approaches will constitute the seminar, as well as role plays on how to react in difficult situations. Furthermore, input will be given on the legal situation and both national and international common practice of this task in the natural sciences. 

Prof. Decker would like to invite the participants to send him - prior to the seminar - information on their respective questions, so that the content of the seminar can be adapted accordingly.

This workshop gives you an overview about the requirements and rules for publishing scientific articles. The following points will be covered in this 2-days workshop:

• Introduction: why publish and when to start 
• Choosing a journal, using JANE and other applications, practical exercise
• Using ThinkCheckSubmit
• Your audience, those impact factors, open access
• Practical exercise on Scopus and WoS
• Ethics of Publication; Vancouver rules, coauthors, correspondents, chaperones
• Submitting your MS, covering letters.  Rejection – don’t panic!
• Different kinds of rejection: editorial, outright, with serious flaws
• Conditional acceptance, dealing with those referees
• Writing responses to referees, practical exercise
• Accepted!!  The final text. Proofs: what to do and what not to do, practical
• Copyright. ‘First online’, preprints & preprint servers
• Publicizing the publication; your colleagues, your boss, your institution, the world

Trainer
Andrew Davis, PhD works at the Institute of Zoology, University of Göttingen. With a PhD in Zoology from University College Cardiff, Wales, UK, he now specializes in biology, ecology and environment. He has extensive experience in teaching post-graduate students in scientific writing & publishing, manuscript preparation, experimental design & statistics. 

Note: Registration of GSLS doctoral researchers has priority to non-GSLS participants. Non-GSLS participants pay a service and workshop fee of EUR 50 by bank transfer.