We conducted a retrospective cross-sectional survey of 40 pharmacists, including hospital and community pharmacists, who attended the workshop. All participants were members of the Mie Pharmaceutical Association.

The workshop information was distributed via e-email to all pharmacies and hospitals belonging to the Mie Pharmaceutical Association in the period from August 21, 2023 to September 18, 2023. The workshop was held on October 1, 2023. The timetable is presented in Supplementary Table 1. First, the lectures focused on selecting an appropriate study design. Second, the research topics were assigned to two groups of five to six members each to construct the study project with the assigned responsible mentor. Finally, a presentation session was conducted to discuss the project.

Questionnaires were collected using Google Forms (Google, Mountain View, CA, USA). The questionnaire consisted of basic information, influencing backgrounds on research activities, satisfaction, and knowledge/awareness. Details of the questions are provided in Supplementary Table 2. For questions on knowledge/awareness, the same responses were obtained before and after the workshop. While questionnaires before the workshop were collected at the time of registration, a second questionnaire survey was performed immediately after the workshop.

The effectiveness of the present workshop was evaluated based on an increase in the participants’ knowledge and awareness of research activities via the questionnaires.

While the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to examine the differences in continuous variables before and after the workshop, categorical factors were analyzed using McNemar’s test. Categorical variables were compared using the chi-square test or Fisher’s exact test.

For the question “Have you ever reported results of your research activities (conference presentations and/or research papers) since you started working? (Supplementary Table 2), “Only once or not at all” responses were defined as low involvement in research activities. For multivariate logistic regression analysis, low involvement was used as the objective variable and factors that exhibited p < 0.05 in the univariate analysis. DT analysis was performed according to our previous study [6], based on the chi-squared automatic interaction detection algorithm. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS Statistics version 27 (IBM Japan, Tokyo, Japan), and the significance level was set at p < 0.05.