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

New to research? This is the one book you should read. It's got everything. It'll take you from choosing your project and starting out in a lab, through designing experiments, acquiring data and performing the appropriate analysis, and all the way on to writing up your work for publication, and presenting your work at conferences.

Kevin Hamill

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About

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

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About the Author

Kevin Hamill

I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in England where I teach Laboratory Skills to Masters students, Experimental Design to PhD students, and run writing courses for Postgraduate students. I currently have five PhD students working in my laboratory and each year I also supervise three to four undergraduate and four to five Masters-level project students. Much of the content in this book actually started life as the handouts and lecture notes from the courses I teach. As the years have passed and the material grown it realised that I had generated a resource that would be more useful gathered togetehr into a single volume book that could be easily shared. Hence, this book.

In addition to teaching, I run a molecular biology research lab focused on cell to extracellular matrix interactions (LaNts and laminins). My team’s work encompasses a range of scales from whole organism human disease samples and transgenic animals, to ex vivo, 2D and 3D cell cultures, and molecular or protein biochemistry measuring alternative splicing and protein-protein interactions in vitro. I have written and reviewed many papers and serve as an associate editor on research journals within my field. Some of the examples within this book come from my research; however, the core messages apply equally well across the entire biological sciences and medicine disciplines.

Before moving to the University of Liverpool, I was a post-doctoral researcher and then Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Chicago. In total, I spent almost seven years working in the USA. I obtained my PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Dundee, Scotland. For most things in science, the location of the lab does not make a difference. However, I have attempted to point out local differences wherever these are relevant.

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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