Psychology Research and Wet Lab Research

[sunshine02]

I went to a research seminar presentation at my school today, and one person mentioned that research in psychology is mostly clinical--involving things like calling people and filling out questionares and therefore more like clinical research and easier to produce results and get published.

Is this true? I kind of have my doubts, but I am curious what others think. I've heard some say that psychology is a field that's very hard for undergrads to get results and publish in, and I heard the exact opposite today. For those of you who've done psych research, what do you think?

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[sunshine02]

Also, I know an area called Clinical Psychology. Out of curiosity, would all research conducted in that field be considered clinical research and not bench?

 

[sunflower18]

I do psychology research. It's working with people -- definitely not lab work. But it's not surveys either. It's electrophysiology, and I measure EEGs on people in response to various stimuli. I then take those brain waves and process and analyze them to look at overall trends and effects. I'm not sure the relative ease of being published, but it's interesting! I think I would really hate doing surveys, but I do miss cell culturing and assays and animal work from my previous lab.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

Psychology is a big field and your experience can differ depending on what subfield you're doing research in. Clinical psychology would obviously be very similar to clinical research. Social psychology research would be largely survey based. Biopsychology can be indistinguishable from neuroscience research in many cases. Cognitive psychology research is probably the least similar to biomedical research as it has a lot of methods all its own.

As for psych being easier to publish in, again, it really depends. On the personality/social/clinical psych side, yes, as a lot of that research can be survey based and after 1-2 semesters of running psych 101 students you'll have all the data you'll need. However, sometimes that research is experimentally based, and in that case it's probably just as hard to publish. Cognitive psych tends to be almost all experimental science, so it's also rigorous to publish in. It's not wet lab research, but I'm not sure if anyone really cares too much. Biopsych research, as I said earlier, is essentially the same thing as neuro research, so you won't run into any problems there.

 

[OldGrandDad]

I went to a research seminar presentation at my school today, and one person mentioned that research in psychology is mostly clinical--involving things like calling people and filling out questionares and therefore more like clinical research and easier to produce results and get published.

Is this true? I kind of have my doubts, but I am curious what others think. I've heard some say that psychology is a field that's very hard for undergrads to get results and publish in, and I heard the exact opposite today. For those of you who've done psych research, what do you think?

More similar to clinical research? Yes. Clinical research? Not really, unless you are doing clinical psychology research with patients/disease models etc, or psychiatric research (molecular/pharm/drug studies).

Having been in a variety of labs ranging in topics from social psych (surveys and scenarios) to cancer biology (cell lines, molecular work, mouse studies), I would say that your questions are impossible to answer. If all you want is to get published, look online and find a paper mill at your school and beg to be in their lab. Otherwise find something you are genuinely interested in and want to learn more about. Research teaches you a certain mindset and appreciation for learning, and it can be a nice topic to discuss in an interview but it isn't the most important thing in an application. My psych research didn't pan out and I was never published, but neither did a lot of my bench research. I spent a year working on a project (plus another summer after I graduated) and worked my ass off, and I am only submitting a manuscript now (a month into MS1). Publications are nice, but it is much more important to be able to write and discuss your research well.

 

[kyamh]

Otherwise find something you are genuinely interested in and want to learn more about. Research teaches you a certain mindset and appreciation for learning, and it can be a nice topic to discuss in an interview but it isn't the most important thing in an application. My psych research didn't pan out and I was never published, but neither did a lot of my bench research. I spent a year working on a project (plus another summer after I graduated) and worked my ass off, and I am only submitting a manuscript now (a month into MS1). Publications are nice, but it is much more important to be able to write and discuss your research well.

This!

As I understand from adcoms who have visited my school to talk to the pre-meds, research is important on an application because of the lessons it teaches you and the work ethic it instills - not just publications. Certainly, a publication can be proof of your level of work and commitment, but being excited about your work and being able to talk about it fully and in an interesting way is supposed to be more important. Think of it this way: you may have a publication, but if all you can say is that you handed out surveys for 3 months and then ran the data through a t-test then you aren't very impressive.

Do what you care about and what is exciting to you.