It was a two day workshop in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Public Health, Bhubaneswar (IIPH-B) with the support of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR). The Indian Institute of Public Health is an initiative started by the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). It is a new institute...only about a couple of years into its existence in Bhubaneswar.
Dr Sanghamitra Pati of IIPH-B and I got to meet through the Author AID forum. Soon, we realized that both Dr Pati and I wanted to do something for our state, Odisha in the form of scientific writing workshop. While I was on a personal visit to Odisha last summer, she invited me to speak on "Writing a Scientific Manuscript and Getting Published". This was during a workshop on Research Methodologies at IIPH-B. It was short talk of about half an hour.
Ever since then we had been wanting to conduct a standalone scientific writing workshop at Bhubaneswar or Cuttack. Without a partial funding by ICMR, I am not sure we could have arranged for such a successful workshop.
IIPH-B offered its conference room as the venue. They also managed all the logistics. AIMWA helped in arranging for speakers on various topics.
The topics we touched upon during the 2-day workshop included:
- Medical Writing Basics
- Ethics in Scientific Writing
- Preparing for Publication
- Writing an Original Research Article
- Literature Search
- Referencing Styles and Software (demo)
- Writing a Narrative Review Article
- Writing a Case Report
We wanted to limit the seats to 25. But there was such an overwhelming response that we had to accommodate 40 participants. We hope to come back to Odisha again soon with a more extensive workshop that focuses on limited topics.