Course Catalog

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Research Data Center (RDC) provides approved researchers access to confidential data for research purposes.  This one-hour webinar will be presented by Jing Tian, M.D., Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Division of Research and Methodology (DRM), Research Data Center.  During this webinar, Dr. Tian will present information about accessing confidential data, the variety of data that is made available through the RDC, an overview of the application process, the application content, RDC policies and procedures, and NCHS’s virtual data enclave.

In partnership with the NIH Clinical Center's Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology Service (BCES), the NIH Library is offering a class geared to cover the general concepts behind common statistical tests. This two-part lecture series will help participants better understand and prepare data, interpret results and findings, design and prepare studies, and understand the results in published literature.

Part 1 will address considerations for the choice of statistical tests including the importance of study design and hypothesis, type of data and their distributions, and provide a brief review of important statistical features. During the class, time will be devoted to questions from attendees and references will be provided for in-depth self-study.

Although you may attend only one part of this series, attending both parts will give you a better understanding of the most used statistical tests in the biomedical literature. You must register separately for Part 2 of this class series.

In partnership with the NIH Clinical Center's Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology Service (BCES), the NIH Library is offering a class geared to cover the general concepts behind common statistical tests. This two-part lecture series will help participants better understand and prepare data, interpret results and findings, design and prepare studies, and understand the results in published literature.

Part 2 will describe the basic concepts for using common statistical tests such as Chi-square, paired and two-sample t-tests, ANOVA, correlations, simple and multiple regression, logistic regression, and some nonparametric tests. During the class, time will be devoted to questions from attendees and references will be provided for in-depth self-study.

Although you may attend only one part of this series, attending both parts will give you a better understanding of the most used statistical tests in the biomedical literature. You must register separately for Part 1 of this class series.

Learn how Health, United States, a research program from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reports on and integrates trends in national health statistics from multiple data sources. This one-hour webinar by Renee Gindi, PhD, Chief of the Population Health Research and Dissemination Branch with the Division of Analysis and Epidemiology (DAE), will provide an overview of the Health, United States redesign. Attendees will learn how the modernization of this long-standing program allows users to explore national trends, with a focus on health disparities by sex, race and ethnicity, insurance status, poverty level, and education.

This class will provide an overview of Partek Flow software, followed by demonstrations of basic component management in Partek Flow. Partek Flow is a web-based application for the analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) including RNA, small RNA, and DNA sequencing.  With an easy-to-use graphical interface and the ability to build custom analysis pipelines, Partek Flow enables users to carry out routine NGS data analysis using dozens of popular algorithms without writing codes or running command lines tools. 

By the end of this class, attendees will be able describe how to access Partek Flow from the NIH Library, discuss basic uses cases, understand how to transfer files, outline methods for importing data, and creating workflows.

This session teaches students to use SciFinder-n in their approach to infringement and patentability searches. Explore the science hidden in patents, search patent Markush structures, and check the chemical landscape. By the end of this training, students can expect to learn: about the patent content in SciFinder-n, how to use an AI-driven prior art analysis, how to explore a chemical landscape, how to find substance locations with PatentPak, and how to search Markush structures.

This introductory class will provide an overview of patent search tools, with a focus on search and analysis options in a variety of patent databases: Espacenet, Google Patents, PATENTSCOPE, Derwent Innovations Index, and Lens.org. During this session, the instructor will review patent search concepts including patent families, patent classification systems, and kind codes. Chemical structure and genetic sequence search options will also be covered.

The training will overview the current status of pathway tools, with focus on software available to NIH community.  It will discuss the biological interoperation of mutation and expression data in the context of pathways, pathway databases, and popular web-based pathway tools. The pathway software GSEA, g: Profiler, and PATHVIEW will be used to demonstrate how to run the pathway analysis of expression data against GO (Gene Ontology), KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), and MSigDB (Molecular Signatures Database).

This class focuses on data and project management using R and RStudio. RStudio makes it possible to work on a complete research project in a more efficient, integrated, and organized manner. This course is designed to be relevant to participants from different disciplines. You must have taken the Introduction to R and RStudio class to be successful in this class.

Upon completion of this class participants should be able to define project management from a data science perspective, list the advantages of using RStudio projects, apply best practices for setting up RStudio for projects, create a new RStudio Project, and discuss best practices for organizing data in an RStudio project.

Learn how you can promote your scholarly output using ORCiD, from creating an ORCiD iD that is a permanent identifier for researchers, to using the full site to help track your publications and your peer review work for journals. NIH encourages everyone who is engaged in research, grants, and research education to create an ORCiD identifier. Using ORCiD enables researchers to highlight their scholarly work more effectively. This class will review resources and best practices for creating an ORCiD profile that can be included in your CV, grant applications and bio to increase the visibility of your scholarly activities.

This class is designed for those who want to extend the basics covered in the Introduction to Quarto for Scholarly Publishing class. In this class you will learn how to format tables, work with LaTeX equations, customize code blocks, and insert images. 

Upon completion of this class participants should be able to create tables, customize code-blocks, create LaTeX equations, and insert images into a markdown document. You must have taken Introduction to Quarto for Scholarly Publishing to be successful in this class.

This class is designed for those who want to extend the basics covered in the Introduction to Quarto for Scholarly Publishing to Formatting class. This class uses Quarto to render formatted citations and bibliographies included in a journal article, report, or presentation.  This class also discusses the Zotero API, which is supported in RStudio. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. This class also covers exporting citations from Endnote in a format supported by Quarto. EndNote is a software package which is designed to help you to organize citations and create a bibliography. The current version of EndNote available from the NIH Library is Endnote 21. 

You must have taken Introduction to Quarto for Scholarly Publishing to be successful in this class.

Upon completion of this class participants should be able to link RStudio to Zotero, create a bibliography and link it to a markdown document, insert citations using RStudio Visual Interface, and via the command line, and download and link a CSL file which specifies the formatting to use when generating the citations and bibliography.

This one-hour introductory class provides researchers with an overview of online resources for locating research datasets, data repositories, and data publications for data sharing and re-use. Participants will learn search strategies for locating datasets through federated data search portals and generalist data repositories, including directories for locating discipline-specific and institutional data repositories. An overview of key issues to consider when re-using datasets or when locating a data repository for sharing and preservation purposes will be discussed.

This class will provide an overview of databases and author profile websites to help locate experts in a research field. During this session, the instructor will review how to use tools to locate authors related to a specific topic, find algorithmically generated author profiles, and how to find author-maintained profiles. The instructor will also share how to identify additional citation and publication metrics for authors using InCites, including international and industry collaborations, first and last author positions, number of publications in high-impact journals, and more. The class will also address how to identify potential conflicts of interest when locating potential reviewers for grants and contracts. 

Galaxy is a scientific workflow, data integration, data analysis, and publishing platform that makes computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming experience. This workshop will introduce RNA-seq data analysis followed by tutorials showing the use of popular RNA-seq analysis packages and preparing participants to independently run basic RNA-Seq analysis for expression profiling. The hands-on exercises will run on the Galaxy platform using Illumina paired-end RNA-seq data. The workshop will be taught by NCI staff and is open to NIH and HHS staff.

One of the biggest challenges for researchers is keeping up on all the literature in their field of study. There are several types of alerts which can be created to keep up to date on various advances. This session will provide a short overview of some of the various library products, web resources, and alert services available, demonstrating how to build a better search and create email alerts from those searches.

Do you want to write a review, but not sure what type of review would be best for your research question or topic? In today’s research environment, everyone seems to be doing a review of some type, especially systematic reviews.  However, not all literature reviews are systematic reviews, nor need to be. There are many other types of evidence-based reviews. This session will explore the various literature review types, the associated methodologies of each, and how to select the best option for you. Class objectives: understand the different types of literature reviews; learn how to identify the best review type for you; and identify at least two review types and their differences.

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) & Variation Suite (SVS) is an analytic tool created to empower researchers to perform complex analyses and visualizations on genomic and phenotypic data. Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) continues to be an effective method for identifying disease susceptible genes in humans and other organisms. Attendees will learn how SVS can be used to perform GWAS and genomic prediction, how to analyze high-quality SNPs by performing the association test, how to use quality control metrics, and how to use genomic prediction with K-Fold to estimate which genotypes best predict a desired phenotype.

In partnership with the NIH Clinical Center's Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology Service (BCES), the NIH Library is offering a class to assist researchers in writing a manuscript. Participants will become familiar with statistical issues that can arise as well as recommendations to prevent them. At the end of the class, participants should have a good sense of what to do and not to do when writing the statistical sections of a manuscript. Most of the examples will be related to clinical research; however, anyone can benefit from the tips shared. Plenty of time will be devoted for questions, and references will be provided for more in-depth self-study.

This class complements, How to Write a Research Paper Parts 1 & 2, as it specifically covers key points in writing the statistical portion of a manuscript – particularly for clinical research. Attendance to How to Write a Research Paper is not required to benefit from this class.

What’s the difference between “regular” statistics (i.e. what you may have been using in the past several years) and the “new” Bayesian statistics? Which one should you use for your next study?

This is Part 1 of a two-part lecture series intended for non-statisticians interested in understanding the basic, intuitive thinking behind the two schools of statistical inference: frequentist (known as classical) and Bayesian. Part 1 will address the frequentist approach, and will cover the concepts of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, Type I and Type II errors, statistical power, and p-values. Technical details will be kept to an absolute minimum.

Although you may attend only one part of this series, attending both parts will give you a better sense of the contrast between these two statistical approaches. During the class, time will be devoted to questions from attendees and references will be provided for in-depth self-study. You must register separately for Part 2 of this class series.