June 2019 — Fruit and Vegetable Month
Here, at Cremer Consulting, we know only too well how crucial maintaining a healthy diet is for you and your career. If you're already eating plenty of fruit and vegetables every day, you are on the right track. You may be ready for the next step: avoiding stress. To this end, you must learn to be better at delegating or outsourcing certain activities.
Another article accepted for publication
A new piece of happy news: the article by Prof. Damien Gruson from Cliniques Universitaires St-Luc, Brussels, Belgium, has been accepted for publication in Clinical Biochemistry. The article focuses on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science (DS) in the healthcare domain.
The use of DS and AI is rapidly increasing, and with it there has come a progressive transformation in laboratory medicine. These technologies carry the potential to address unmet clinical needs by enhancing personalized patient care and improving the efficiency of laboratory processes and care pathways. Such evolution is in its infancy, however, and the balance between usability and desirability remains a matter of concern.
As for other laboratory activities, continuous operation and care continuity must be guaranteed. In this high-velocity data environment, efficient back-ups are critical for restoring data, operating systems, applications, and files. Teams must define recovery point objectives and the maximum acceptable amount of data loss. The need for extensive validation of clinical performance will be key. Multidisciplinary teams that include physicians, laboratorians, data scientists, and healthcare professionals play a key role here.
Another crucial element of DS integration into laboratory practices is the ability of international scientific societies to outline best practice guidance. Addressing the ethical challenges associated with DS and AI is essential, and interdisciplinary validation of AI systems is crucial to ensure their reliability.
Getting your writing right!
Reports and business proposals are often written in poor English, with little thought about the impact they will have. Writing is a skill that needs to be developed like many other skills, but even the most practice-averse can improve their writing by avoiding some common pitfalls.
- Typos and grammatical errors: avoid careless mistakes. Confronted with poor grammar and spelling errors, your clients may question how much care you will take with their businesses. Therefore, check and double-check, or ask a colleague to check as well.
- Needless managerial jargon: people are becoming tired of reading about “first-class- performance” and the “cutting edge”. Create a jargon-free piece of writing that speaks directly to the reader.
- Forgetting your reader: rather than focusing on ensuring the piece is written as quickly as possible, spend a while thinking about your readers. What information do they want? In what form do they need it? And how much detail do they need?
- Long words and elaborate phrases: your readers are far too busy to spend time deciphering them.
- Complex sentences: write clear and straightforward sentences to catch the readers’ attention straight away.
Part 1. Tips for writing a good introduction
In scientific papers, the same errors concerning the structure and content of a manuscript’s sections recur frequently. As a result, the reader is unable to retrieve the key messages. To help you structure your manuscript better, you will find some tips below. Let’s start with the introduction section.
- The most common error is to write an introduction that is too long. The primary function of this section is simply to define and contextualize your research topic. Although there is no strict size limit for the introduction, bear in mind that it should not exceed 10% of your total manuscript word count.
- A lack of coherence in the introduction is commonplace. Whilst contextualizing the research topic and presenting the current state of knowledge, the introduction should gradually guide the reader’s thoughts towards the study objectives. Ideally, the reader should have a good understanding of the topic’s relevance, even before learning about the study objectives.
- Avoid writing a long literature review and, when referring to a published paper, put the emphasis on the results properly speaking and not on its author or authors.
- Precision and conciseness are the guiding principles you should follow throughout your introduction. In this way, you will arouse the readers’ curiosity without boring them to death.