We gratefully acknowledge the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Queen’s University for allowing us to post this material, which appears on their website.
- Not establishing a focused, answerable question.
- Enlisting a research supervisor who doesn't make sufficient time to advise and help you throughout the stages of the project.
- Picking a topic about which you have little interest.
- Planning a small, complicated study that attempts to answer many questions, rather than an appropriately sized simple study focused on one primary objective/question.
- Not taking the time to draft a research outline to keep your research team coordinated and on schedule.
- Not being realistic about how much time and effort your project requires.
- Basing a prospective study on outcomes that are rare or take a long time to occur.
- Entering data into a spreadsheet using formats that are not compatible with analytical software. The only thing worse than entering data is having to enter it twice!
- Not meeting with a statistician to talk about the analysis before you begin collecting the data.
- Waiting too long to begin.