STENT Overview


The Ideal Collaborative Research Project


There is no perfect study, but for the purposes of a research collaborative project, certain types of projects have been shown to work well in the early stages of the collaborative. This may help trainees develop their own ideas:

Short term data collection (e.g. primary outcome at 1 month or less). This is because the shorter the length of the study, the easier it is to engage trainees to carry out the project and complete data collection before they move onto their next job

Common pathologies. The more common the problem being investigated, the easier it will be to recruit adequate numbers of patients across many centres.

Observational studies.i.e. where clinical practice is not being changed as part of the study. Sometimes termed cohort studies. Sometimes this data can be obtained from audit. The advantage of these types of studies is that ethical approval and funding may not always be required. To produce higher levels of evidence, interventional studies (e.g. randomized controlled trials) are important but observational studies still have an important role, particularly in generating hypotheses.

Interventional studies – if randomising patients to one arm or another, ensure that the majority of clinicians have “equipoise”. I.e. that at each centre, the lead clinician has genuine uncertainty over whether the interventions under investigation are better than one another and that they would be happy to randomise patients to either of the interventions. If many clinicians have strong preferences for one intervention or another, the study will not recruit well.

For interventional studies – the simpler the intervention and the easier it will be to administer as part of clinical practice, the more likely the study will be successful. Studies which require significant deviation from clinical practice and require specialist skills not usually available are more difficult.

Once the collaborative has successfully delivered observational studies, there can be a greater emphasis on interventional studies and once interventional studies have been delivered, there can be a greater emphasis on complex interventions. However if the right idea and study is suggested, whether it is interventional or observational, it will be taken forward.

We invite anyone with a keen interest in Urology to get in touch (via admin@bursturology.com) to discuss the potential of a research collaboration. Below, we have described ways you can collaborate with us. Please use the project proposal proforma accessible here to help structure your proposal.



BURST Endorsement and Collaboration Policy


Please get in touch with us admin@bursturology.com if you would like BURST to formally endorse your project. A formal endorsement may lead to BURST promoting your work to our mailing list, on our social media and through many other avenues.

A BURST endorsement validates the project to our members and reassures them that it has a mark of high quality which makes them far more likely to engage. We will then list your work on our website as a formal BURST endorsed project and can advertise this as such.

The ideal pathway to formal endorsement is that representatives from our collaborative are involved in the development and peer review of the study and we prefer to be contacted in advance at the planning stage rather that act solely as a distributer. Those representatives (usually 1 or 2) should be recognised as mainline authors on the work and the BURST research collaborative should be recognised as well.

If we are approached after the project has already launched, we could still formally endorse it if the quality is high enough and the impact is important enough but would still ask for our representatives to be involved in study write up, approval of the paper, publication, and authorship.

A formal BURST endorsement may result in a targeted email to our subscribers, quarterly newsletter updates and a co-ordinated social media campaign. If BURST are not involved as steering members in the project promotion may be restricted.

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