3. Basic skills#
There are a few skills we assume people joining our group will already have. We mention them here because they are essential and often taken for granted. Most of these you can easily figure out how to use on your own, or by revising content that would have been taught in your first or second year of undergraduate study:
ISI, Scopus, OVID, PsycInfo, Google Scholar. Ring a bell? If not, make sure you find out about these search engines. If you do know about them, make sure you also know how to combine output from searches (what does AND do, what does OR achieve?). Make sure you can search by author AND keyword if necessary.
Citation searches. Make sure you can conduct searches for citations of literature (e.g., to find what other work has cited that article).
APA style guide. As you will (most likely) be writing for psychology, make sure you are familiar with writing and referencing in the APA format.
Calendar invites. We expect everyone to send calendar invites if organising a meeting and accept (or decline) calendar invites to meetings. This can be done using any online calendar of your choice (e.g., Google, Apple, Outlook).
Research designs and statistical analysis. We expect that group members will have had undergraduate-level training in research methods and statistics for psychology. Make sure you know what terms like “2 x 2 design”, “correlational”, and “ANOVA” mean.
Effective note-taking. Having a good record of what was discussed in meetings saves time and effort later on! Everyone has their own preferred way to do this, but make sure you have at minimum a record of what needs to be done and by whom going forward.
Virtual meeting software. TeDCog is committed to providing greater accessibility to meetings. So you will need to know how to schedule and attend virtual meetings, typically using Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Other skills that build on those basics will be discussed during our fortnightly professional development sessions that follow on from the weekly meeting.