In my first post on this blog, I set myself 3 PhD-related goals for 2017. One of those goals was to read more widely, and more frequently, and I decided that doing the #365papers challenge would be a good way to do that.

July’s post for #365papers was too cocky – I finished July ahead of schedule and then skipped off on holiday. August’s reading was not so good. It’s currently Saturday 9th September and I have only just caught up with August’s reading, so still a bit of catching up to do from the start of September!

This month when I did get round to reading I was concentrating on qualitative studies; I was doing my own qualitative analysis through August and it’s nice to get an idea how different people write and look at their own studies. I also managed to have a really good look at the literature on user-testing and think aloud protocols. On September 10th I’ve off to Cape Town for research trip – I’ll be going to the Global Evidence Summit (blog post(s) to follow for more info!), and then I’m staying in Cape Town to meet with clinical trialists based with the South African Medical Research Council. These trialists will be user-testing evidence-presentation formats – this work makes up part of my PhD project so i’ll do a more in-depth blog post another time. Anyway, hopefully September’s reading won’t be quite so late as August’s was…

August’s reading:

1. Supporting positive experiences and sustained participation in clinical trials: looking beyond information provision
2. How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability
3. Barriers to the conduct of randomised clinical trials within all disease areas
4. ‘We knew it was a totally at random thing’: parents’ experiences of being part of a neonatal trial
5. What are funders doing to minimise waste in research?
6. J Guy Scadding and the move from alternation to randomisation
7. UK publicly funded Clinical Trials Units supported a controlled access approach to share individual participant data but highlighted concerns
8. Why do we need evidence-based methods in Cochrane?
9. Receiving a summary of the results of a trial: qualitative study of participants’ views
10. The rights of patients in research
11. Using routinely recorded data in the UK to assess outcomes in a randomised controlled trial: The Trials of Access
12. The impact of active stakeholder involvement on recruitment, retention and engagement of schools, children and their families in the cluster randomised controlled trial of the Healthy Lifestyles Programme (HeLP): a school-based intervention to prevent obesity
13. Evaluating the efficiency of targeted designs for randomised clinical trials
14. Improving clinical trial efficiency: thinking outside the box
15. Stratified randomisation for clinical trials
16. Factors associated with online media attention to research: a cohort study of articles evaluating cancer treatments
17. Feasibility of a randomised single-blind crossover trial to assess the effects of the second-generation slow-release dopamine agonists pramipexole and ropinirole on cued recall memory in idiopathic mild or moderate Parkinson’s disease without cognitive impairment
18. Improving the process of research ethics review
19. Retrospectively registered trials: The Editors’ dilemma
20. Cancer Research UK: Taking a broad view of research impact
21. Getting access to what goes on in people’s heads?: reflections on the think-aloud technique
22. A description of think aloud method and protocol analysis
23. How to study thinking in everyday life: Contrasting think-aloud protocols with descriptions and explanations of thinking
24. Think-aloud technique and protocol analysis in clinical decision-making research
25. The use of think-aloud methods in qualitative research, an introduction to think-aloud methods
26. User-centred design
27. Interpreting the evidence: choosing between randomised and non-randomised studies
28. The use and abuse of multiple outcomes in randomised controlled depression trials
29. The unpredictability paradox: review of empirical comparisons of randomised and non-randomised clinical trials
30. Are randomized clinical trials good for us (in the short term)? Evidence for a “trial effect”
31. The ethics of underpowered clinical trials (Reply – Janosky)