The Obvious in a Nutshell: Science, Medicine, Knowledge, and History

Planning, implementation and revision of the longitudinal scientific curriculum at the Medical School Brandenburg

Objectives

The aim of this paper is to present the development of a longitudinal curriculum for medical students that is rooted in the particularity of the medical sciences and that aims to build and strengthen medical students' scientific skills and use thereof in clinical practice.

Methods

The curriculum development was initiated based on students' feedback on the initial curriculum. To improve and expand the curriculum appropriately, a needs assessment, a literature review to define science specific to the medical sciences and practice, and an analysis of national and international curricula were performed. The curriculum development followed the PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act).

Results

The curriculum extends across the entire medical study programme from semesters 1 to 10. It consists of the seminar series on basic conduct and the epistemological groundings of science, scientific methods in medical research and health sciences, statistics and the scientific internship. Up to the sixth semester, the focus is on the acquisition of skills and abilities to work on and carry out a concrete research project; starting in semester seven, the critical evaluation and application of research results in everyday clinical practice are introduced. The curriculum is taught by epidemiologists, anthropologists, statisticians and public health scholars. Starting in semester seven, seminars are generally taught together with clinicians as tandem teaching. The curriculum is regularly assessed and adjusted.

Conclusions

The Brandenburg Scientific Curriculum can be seen as a model of a longitudinal curriculum to teach scientific thinking and acting. One that is at the same time highly integrated in the medical curriculum overall. A central coordination point seems to be necessary to coordinate the teaching content and to ensure that teachers are interconnected. Furthermore, a complex curriculum in scientific methodology requires a set of teachers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. To ensure equally high-quality education, the variability of research projects and faculty must be taken into account by establishing generally applicable evaluation criteria and fostering faculty development, and providing all students supporting courses throughout the research project.

Citation Network Analysis of the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Background: The first outbreaks of the new coronavirus disease, named COVID-19, occurred at the end of December 2019. This disease spread quickly around the world, with the United States, Brazil and Mexico being the countries the most severely affected. This study aims to analyze the relationship between different publications and their authors through citation networks, as well as to identify the research areas and determine which publication has been the most cited. Methods: The search for publications was carried out through the Web of Science database using terms such as “COVID-19” and “SARS-CoV-2” for the period between January and July 2020. The Citation Network Explorer software was used for publication analysis. Results: A total of 14,335 publications were found with 42,374 citations generated in the network, with June being the month with the largest number of publications. The most cited publication was “Clinical Characteristics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China” by Guan et al., published in April 2020. Nine groups comprising different research areas in this field, including clinical course, psychology, treatment and epidemiology, were found using the clustering functionality. Conclusions: The citation network offers an objective and comprehensive analysis of the main papers on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

A Bibliometric Analysis of the Health Field Regarding Social Networks and Young People

Social networks have historically been used to share information and support regarding health-related topics, and this usage has increased with the rise of online social media. Young people are high users of social media, both as passive listeners and as active contributors. This study aimed to map the trends in publications focused on social networks, health, and young people over the last 40 years. Scopus and the program VOSviewer were used to map the frequency of the publications, keywords, and clusters of researchers active in the field internationally. A structured keyword search using the Scopus database yielded 11,966 publications. The results reveal a long history of research on social networks, health, and young people. Research articles were the most common type of publication (68%), most of which described quantitative studies (82%). The main discipline represented in this literature was medicine, with 6062 documents. North American researchers dominate the field, both as authors and partners in international research collaborations. The present article adds to the literature by elucidating the growing importance of social networks in health research as a topic of study. This may help to inform future investments in public health research and surveillance using these novel data sources.