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Dental Tribune United Kingdom Edition

msc_ad_source_uk.pdf 1 03/08/2009 15:21:59 November 14-20, 20116 MSc Blog United Kingdom Edition Elaine Halley reveals the power of the username and passwords Lost in Ovid W ith just over three months to go before the deadline for the final handing in of the disser- tation, there is a slight sense of panic rising in me which I am struggling to keep down. I fitted my complex case yesterday and remembered to photograph the laboratory work on the models before I bonded the case – thank good- ness. I’ll be reviewing the case today so then all that’s left to do is upload the photographs and finish the write-up and re- flection. My dental nurses asked me yesterday what I needed to do with this case for my MSc so I started to explain that I needed to provide a justification from the literature for every step of the treatment. Yes, you guessed it – I was still talking ten min- utes later and their eyes had completely glazed over. The deadline for the com- plex case write up has been extended to the beginning of December. So far, we have had feedback on our research question, our aims and objec- tives and 2,500 words of a lit- erature review. It would have helped if I had actually read the guidance on the Harvard system for referencing as I got that wrong. I found the litera- ture review to be a challenge which may be related to my choice of question and there being so many papers and tan- gents to explore. The term ‘lost in Ovid’ has meaning to my fellow stu- dents. Ovid is the search tool used through the Manches- ter University Library that searches Pubmed and other databases. What tends to hap- pen is that you find a paper of relevance, and then you find the references of that paper. Then you go down a trail of institutional log-ins trying to source the article in free-text. Whilst doing that, you come across other relevant articles and references which distract you from the original quest and before you know it three hours have gone by and you have a stack of references that may be marginally relevant to your research question. It does feel akin to a labyrinth and maybe a trail of white pebbles would be appropriate. However, I must give some credit here to the system. I am absolutely in awe of the fact that armed with my Univer- sity of Manchester username and password I can access all sorts of academic sites across the globe and full text articles from world wide at the touch of a button and from the comfort of my sitting room. Meanwhile, the current top- ics are 3,500 words on Method- ology and 1,000 on data han- dling and STATISTICS. The hot topic of conversation is how on earth does anyone figure out how to calculate the sample size?! We have hand-outs and web links and examples but I still am none the wiser. DT About the author Elaine Halley BDS DGDP (UK) is the BACD Immediate Past President and the principal of Cherrybank Dental Spa, a private prac- tice in Perth. She is an active member of the AACD and her main interest is cosmetic and ad- vanced restorative dentistry and she has studied extensively in the United States, Europe and the UK.