Three domains of competences

Competence in the subject matter

This basically mean know your topic.

For non-medical doctors, this would normally mean the exact medical topic that is being investigated in the research. Many people thinks it is okay not to know what diabetes or hypertension is before doing the research because ‘the data would explain itself’. This is very not okay. It is also not okay ‘just to know what is necessary,’ because this is not really how knowledge works.

For medical doctors, competence of the subject matter should also be self-checked by telling the difference between evidence and practice guideline. Very often I found myself in an argument with a medical doctor who could not understand that the practice guidelines are not necessary based on strong and up-to-date evidence. The most common example is classification of a disease. A medical doctor tend to classify a cancer by its options of treatment, whilst the treatment does not necessary reflect the cause.

Competence of the subject matter can also mean the non-medical component of the research topic. Just because you are a diabetes doctor, this does not mean you can randomly design an intervention to change the behaviour of an individual without a good understanding about how human behaviour works. I see many people, especially professors, get research grants and publish research papers about how patients should be ‘educated’ to do something, or how the government should introduce a ban to something, without a clear understanding of sociobehavioural interventions.

This recommendation is just for the enthusiasts. Of course, one can never be perfect and know everything. Many of you are just doing the job for the salaries, or just want to be slightly better than the next person. There is no shame in this, but perhaps try to be honest with ourself.

Competence in the research and application methods

This is where the geeky stuff is and is quite self-explanatory. Here I only give comments on what I feel strongly about.

What I feel is there are not short of ‘important people’ who like to advocate a format of research methods, publish in important journals, and say everyone should follow this. The method itself may be okay, but is not necessary the only way of doing things. For example, they create these systematic review methods and prescribe a list of protocols, use loads of world funds to train academics to follow their protocols without challenging why these protocols only have to be in this way (but not other ways), and then publish a reporting guidelines so that those who publish this has to follow this way. Every method has its own limitations, and every perfect method can only be perfect for a period of time, but they are the only people allowed to change the protocols. I see this as some sort of colonisation. This is why I am writing this in English and being viewed lesser simply because English is not my first language.

Now we have these protocols on genomics or other -omics, and artificial intelligence. If you think about it, this is the same as the clinical guideline scenario in the previous section, but this time it is not clinicians, but ‘career methodologists.’ These professors might know in their mind that guidelines are not doctrines, but the train a cohort of academics who do not know the difference.

Therefore, again this is just an opinion for enthusiasts who would like to do research in order to produce knowledge. Do not be blinded or restricted by the protocols or guidelines you follow. You can follow it for the sake of your career, but do not internalise it and become a believer or amplifier of any of these colonising behaviour.

Competence in writing and communication

How do you develop your own confidence in writing and communication, when you are so institutionalised that all your work is internally censored or censored by training?

Internally censoring is also a starting point of self-colonisation. When we are nobody, our supervisors or role models tell us what to write and what not to write. As a more superficial example, most publication channels (i.e. journals) dictate that you have to start with background, methods and results, and then discussion and conclusion. Then people start to dictate what element should be filled in each subsections of each section. And then you need an abstract because the format of the entire article is not sufficient to tell readers what the article is about. And then an abstract becomes a ‘structured’ abstract, so structured that the readers could not make sense of it to an extent that we have to write an abstract of an abstract. They are called something differently like ‘so what’, or ‘research within context.’

And when you are presenting the results in a short poster or a short presentation, even for like 3 minutes, 99% of the supervisors will frown upon you if you do not do it in this format. You cannot blame them, because 99% of the audience is not able to enjoy your presentation without this familiar format. And when we become supervisors or members of the audience, we become one of them. So the system self-accentuated to become the only way. In the music term, you have to pack a good song into a marketable format. This is frustrating, but this is also reality.

The chance of finding someone who really want to listen to your voice is small, and the world is moving towards blaming those who speak. If you would like to be heard, a lot of time you just have so say what is pleasant to the ears. We just need to compromise, and then gradually train ourselves to self-censor, or as known as ‘speak like an adult’.

And it is quite sad and true. I wish to be someone who has time to listen to what people have to offer and look beyond their presentation.

Conclusion

Here we go. I do not really think this piece needs a conclusion but we eventually come to this.