Veterinary Evidence Student Awards

Are you a veterinary medicine, veterinary nursing or veterinary bioscience student?

Would you like to get published in a peer-reviewed veterinary journal before you graduate? Do you also fancy a chance at winning one of three cash prizes?

Then the Veterinary Evidence Student Awards are just for you!

The competition

Enhance your academic and research skills by writing a Knowledge Summary and submitting it to Veterinary Evidence, the open access, peer-reviewed journal of RCVS Knowledge, the charity partner of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

All Knowledge Summary submissions will follow the journal’s standard editorial process, with the modification that all papers will be judged by the journal editors and reviewers using a grading criteria rubric (see ‘Related Documents’ for the full scoring system). The three top-scoring papers will be awarded the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd prizes:

1^st place: £200

2^nd place: £100

3^rd place: £50

To win one of the prizes, a submitted paper must be considered by our judges to be at a ‘publishable standard’. All submissions will be considered for publication, so even if you don’t submit one of the winning entries you still stand a chance of having your paper and name published in Veterinary Evidence.

Authors need to be undergraduate students studying either Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Nursing, Bioveterinary Science or Veterinary Bioscience.

Multiple authors are allowed but any cash prize will be divided by the number of authors.

RCVS Knowledge will publicise details of the award and the names of award winners on our websites and in other relevant publications. The winners will be announced at our VET19 conference in June.

How to enter:

1. Write up your Knowledge Summary on our downloadable template. If you haven’t written a Knowledge Summary before, follow our steps in the next section.
2. Ensure you begin the title of your paper with ‘Veterinary Evidence Student Award’.
3. Register with Veterinary Evidence online.
4. Login and submit your Knowledge Summary to Veterinary Evidence.

The deadline for submissions is 31^st March 2019.

If you have any queries about the entry process please contact the Managing Editor of the journal.

How to write a Knowledge Summary

Knowledge Summaries are like Critically Appraised Topics; they answer a specific clinical question by looking at the best available evidence.

Follow the steps below to write your Knowledge Summary:

1.       Ask an answerable question

Your clinical question should take the form of a PICO, which stands for Patient or Population, Intervention(s), Comparison and Outcome. You can choose from one of the existing available questions or write your own. For guidance on writing a PICO question please download our EBVM Toolkit.

2.       Conduct a literature search

Once you have chosen the question you want to answer, you should then carry out a literature search. You should use CAB Abstracts and at least one other database of your choosing when searching the literature. For guidance on literature searching, download EBVM Toolkit 2

3.       Appraise the evidence

Examine the quality of each study identified by your literature search, as well as how well they relate to your question – are the findings relevant to the clinical setting/situation?

EBVM Toolkit 3 introduces the ‘levels of evidence’ a study provides, and EBVM Toolkit 4 can help you identify the study design.

4.       Write your Knowledge Summary

Write your Knowledge Summary using downloadable template from Veterinary Evidence. This will help you identify key points from each study, appraise and reflect upon these findings in clinical practice, and reach a clinical bottom line.

5.       Submit your Knowledge Summary

Submit your completed Knowledge Summary to Veterinary Evidence.

Check out the Knowledge Summaries that have been published so far for examples of how yours should look (or just for some inspiration).