scholarly journals The hitchhikers' guide to reading and writing health research

Author(s):  
Arindam Basu

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of critically reading research papers and writing of research proposals and reports. Research methods is a general term that includes the processes of observation of the world around the researcher, linking background knowledge with foreground questions, drafting a plan of collection of data and framing theories and hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, and finally, drafting or writing the research to evoke new knowledge. These processes vary with the themes and disciplines that the researcher engages in; nevertheless, common motifs can be found. In this paper, we propose three methods are interlinked: a deductive reasoning process where the structure of the thought can be captured critically; an inductive reasoning method where the researcher can appraise and generate generalisable ideas from observations of the world; and finally, abductive reasoning method where the world can be explained or the phenomena observed can be explained or be accounted for. This step or reasoning is also about framing theories, testing and challenging established knowledge or finding best theories and how theories best fit the observations. We start with a discussion of the different types of statements that one can come across in any scholarly literature or even in lay or semi-serious literature, appraise them, and identify arguments from non-arguments, and explanations from non-explanations. Then we outline three strategies to appraise and identify reasonings in explanations and arguments. We end with a discussion on how to draft a research proposal and a reading/archiving strategy of research.

Author(s):  
Patrick C. Kyllonen

Reasoning ability refers to the power and effectiveness of the processes and strategies used in drawing inferences, reaching conclusions, arriving at solutions, and making decisions based on available evidence. The topic of reasoning abilities is multidisciplinary—it is studied in psychology (differential and cognitive), education, neuroscience, genetics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. There are several distinct forms of reasoning, implicating different reasoning abilities. Deductive reasoning involves drawing conclusions from a set of given premises in the form of categorical syllogisms (e.g., all x are y) or symbolic logic (e.g., if p then q). Inductive reasoning involves the use of examples to suggest a rule that can be applied to new instances, invoked, for example, when drawing inferences about a rule that explains a series (of numbers, letters, events, etc.). Abductive reasoning involves arriving at the most likely explanation for a set of facts, such as a medical diagnosis to explain a set of symptoms, or a scientific theory to explain a set of empirical findings. Bayesian reasoning involves computing probabilities on conclusions based on prior information. Analogical reasoning involves coming to an understanding of a new entity through how it relates to an already familiar one. The related idea of case-based reasoning involves solving a problem (a new case) by recalling similar problems encountered in the past (past cases or stored cases) and using what worked for those similar problems to help solve the current one. Some of the key findings on reasoning abilities are that (a) they are important in school, the workplace, and life, (b) there is not a single reasoning ability but multiple reasoning abilities, (c) the ability to reason is affected by the content and context of reasoning, (d) it is difficult to accelerate the development of reasoning ability, and (e) reasoning ability is limited by working memory capacity, and sometimes by heuristics and strategies that are often useful but that can occasionally lead to distorted reasoning. Several topics related to reasoning abilities appear under different headings, such as problem solving, judgment and decision-making, and critical thinking. Increased attention is being paid to reasoning about emotions and reasoning speed. Reasoning ability is and will remain an important topic in education.


Human Arenas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Manuti ◽  
Giuseppe Mininni ◽  
Rosa Scardigno ◽  
Ignazio Grattagliano

Abstract In line with the general aims of scientific textuality, research papers in the biomedical and psychiatric academic domains mostly attempt to demonstrate the validity of their assumptions and to contrast with the sense of uncertainty that sometimes frames their conclusions. Moving from this premise, the present paper aimed to focus on these features and to investigate if and the extent to which biomedical and psychiatric texts convey different social-epistemic rhetoric of uncertainty. In view of this, a qualitative study was conducted adopting diatextual analysis to investigate a corpus of 298 scientific articles taken from the British Medical Journal and from the British Journal of Psychiatry published in 2013. Our analytical approach led to identifying two different types of social-epistemic rhetoric. The first one was mostly oriented to “describing” the world, accounting for the body-mind nexus as conceptualized within the “medical” point of view. On the other hand, the second one was oriented to “interpreting” the world, debating the problematic and critical features of the body-mind relationship as developed within the psychiatry discursive realm.


2021 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman

Modern science relies largely on method or, rather, on the claim that by employing a systematic, impersonal method, human reasoning can transcend the mind’s subjective experience of reality and discover the true, external causes of experience. In the early stages of modern science’s emergence out of medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy, Francis Bacon argued that this method was to be based on induction and experiment, without a priori mental input and with a minimum of mathematics. Rene Descartes argued that the required method was to be based on deduction, mathematics, and a priori and innate ideas, with a minimum of experiment. For Descartes, experiment served primarily as a check on deductive reasoning; for Bacon, experiment was a source of knowledge and constrained our inductive reasoning about empirical facts. Despite their differing styles, Descartes and Bacon together concretized the idea that a systematic method of reasoning could give us knowledge of the world.


Author(s):  
Stefan Helmreich ◽  
Sophia Roosth

This chapter examines how natural philosophers and scientists in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries employed the term “life form.” It asks how life came to have a form, where the term “life form” came from, and what “life form” has come to mean in the contemporary moment, when it is possible to use the term to refer to as-yet-conjectural manifestations that may redefine the very referent of life itself. To map the historical transformation of the term “life form,” the chapter draws on Raymond Williams's 1976 Keywords, in which Williams offered histories of keywords in social theory, detailing the shifting, contested meanings of such terms as “culture,” “nature,” and “ideology.” Using this approach, the chapter identifies a move from deductive reasoning to inductive reasoning to abductive reasoning.


Author(s):  
Maryam Khorshidi ◽  
Jay Woodward ◽  
Jami J. Shah

A battery of tests for assessing the cognitive skills needed for the conceptual design is being developed. Divergent thinking and visual thinking tests were fully developed and validated previously. This paper focuses on the development of a test on qualitative reasoning skill. Indicators of qualitative reasoning are identified and categorized as: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and intuitive physics; the derivation of each is based on both cognitive science and empirical studies of design. The paper also considers the metrics for measuring skill levels in different individuals and candidate test items and grading rubric for each skill.


Author(s):  
Y. Arockia Suganthi ◽  
Chitra K. ◽  
J. Magelin Mary

Dengue fever is a painful mosquito-borne infection caused by different types of virus in various localities of the world. There is no particular medicine or vaccine to treat person suffering from dengue fever. Dengue viruses are transmitted by the bite of female Aedes (Ae) mosquitoes. Dengue fever viruses are mainly transmitted by Aedes which can be active in tropical or subtropical climates. Aedes Aegypti is the key step to avoid infection transmission to save millions of people in all over the world. This paper provides a standard guideline in the planning of dengue prevention and control measures. At the same time gives the priorities including clinical management and hospitalized dengue patients have to address essentially.


2001 ◽  
Vol 152 (12) ◽  
pp. 484-489
Author(s):  
Christoph Ernst

Evaluation of archive material from southwest Rhineland, Germany,has provided new knowledge on the development of forests in the 18th century. The society of those times had three different main requirements, which called for three different types of forest; for wood production, agriculture and hunting. But both landed gentry and the community as a whole were interested in maximising the use of the forest. It is therefore not accurate to conclude that wood production was only in the interest of the landowners and agriculture in the interest of the rest of the community. In addition, the different types of forest were subject to mutual dependence because changing one parameter meant that the balance governing wood production,grazing and arable areas, as well as habitat for game,also shifted. These interests, both divergent and common, of the population as a whole lead to the conclusion that forestry development was a highly political issue, and that the influence of the non-owning part of the population was greater than previously thought.


Author(s):  
T. M. Robinson

This article argues the following five claims: 1. Plato’s description of the origins of cosmos in the Timaeus is not a myth, nor something unlikely: when he called it an eikos mythos or eikos logos, he meant a likely or trustworthy account on this very subject. 2. Among the details in this account, the following are prominent and surprising: a) the world was fashioned in time, in that precise point that was the beginning of time; b) several kinds of duration can be distinguished in cosmology (mainly eternity, sempiternity, perpetuity and time); and c) space is an entity characterized by movement and tension. 3. In the Statesman, Plato repeats much the same thing, adding this time the strange notion that the universe’s circular movement is periodically reversed. 4. In spite of the important differences in detail, there is a striking similarity between Plato’s account of the origins of the world and the explanation adopted by much of modern cosmology. 5. What Plato shares with so many instances of recent thought is here termed “cosmological imaginativity”. A first section of the paper deals exclusively with the Timaeus. Claims 1 and 2a are supported by a revision of the meanings of mythos and logos, followed by brief reference and discussion of the argument at Timaeus 27d, leading to the conclusion that Plato affirms that the ever-changing world has indeed had a beginning in time. Claim 2b describes five different types of duration, corresponding to Forms, the Demiurge, Space, the [empirical] world and its contents, physical objects. The second section is concerned with the myth in the Statesman, discussing it as a parallel and describing its peculiar turn to the Timaeus’ cosmology and cosmogony, a complex spheric and dynamic model. After digressing into some important ideas in modern cosmology, touching especially on affinities of some of Einstein’s ideas with of Plato’s own, the paper closes with a discussion of cosmological imaginativity, oriented to recover and recognize fully Plato’s greatness as a cosmologist.


The effective altruism movement consists of a growing global community of people who organize significant parts of their lives around two key ideas, represented in its name. Altruism: If we use a significant portion of the resources in our possession—whether money, time, or talents—with a view to helping others, we can improve the world considerably. Effectiveness: When we do put such resources to altruistic use, it is crucial to focus on how much good this or that intervention is reasonably expected to do per unit of resource expended (for example, per dollar donated). While global poverty is a widely used case study in introducing and motivating effective altruism, if the ultimate aim is to do the most good one can with the resources expended, it is far from obvious that global poverty alleviation is highest priority cause area. In addition to ranking possible poverty-alleviation interventions against one another, we can also try to rank interventions aimed at very different types of outcome against one another. This includes, for example, interventions focusing on animal welfare or future generations. The scale and organization of the effective altruism movement encourage careful dialogue on questions that have perhaps long been there, throwing them into new and sharper relief, and giving rise to previously unnoticed questions. In the present volume, the first of its kind, a group of internationally recognized philosophers, economists, and political theorists contribute in-depth explorations of issues that arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 193896552110335
Author(s):  
John W. O’Neill ◽  
Jihwan Yeon

In recent years, short-term rental platforms in the lodging sector, including Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway, have received extensive attention and emerged as potentially alternative suppliers of services traditionally provided by established commercial accommodation providers, that is, hotels. Short-term rentals have dramatically increased the available supply of rooms for visitors to multiple international destinations, potentially siphoning demand away from hotels to short-term rental businesses. In a competitive market, an increase in supply with constant demand would negatively influence incumbent service providers. In this article, we examine the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance in different cities around the world. Specifically, we comprehensively investigate the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance based on hotel class, location type, and region. Furthermore, we segment the short-term rental supply based on its types of accommodations, that is, shared rooms, private rooms, and entire homes, and both examine and quantify the differential effects of these types of short-term rentals on different types of hotels. This study offers a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of multiple short-term rental platforms on hotel performance and offers both conceptual and practical insights regarding the nature and extent of the effects that were identified.


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