In theory...
I expect every student to write a case report. They either write something that they saw themselves, or they go over the video/flouro/op reports of something that we have done recently. The expectation is that they will do 100% of the writing and either I or one of the other mid level residents will help them understand what they are reviewing and help edit for content. Then we expect them to present the case at the departmental conference to get feedback from the faculty (also good face time for them in front of all the faculty). Case reports are ~1000 words, it would take me an afternoon to write it myself. My 'case report log' has ~35 cases on it right now. I don't have the energy to write more case reports. It just isn't worth it, so when clinical residents or students want something to put out, there it is. That case report is that student's project. It is theirs and nobody else's. It allows them to write, edit, think about what journals are looking for and go through the critiquing process as well as learn a little bit of medicine. The expectation is that they will do most of the work on it on their own time and that time with us will be spent either helping them with it or doing other stuff.
The other stuff... Retrospective data analysis gives weak results. You can't say anything definitive, but it can lay the frame work for prospective work. We are extremely busy. We do ~3000 operations a year. I have spent a lot of time along with another of our residents to build infrastructure in our electronic medical records so that we can generate very large datasets quickly. This allows us to say, "I want to study XYZ operation." and within 30 minutes we can have an excel sheet with patient name, DOB, medical record number, phone number, SSN, DOB, race, gender AND their commodities (35 different things, HTN, DM, HLD, CAD etc) tabulated. Once you have that, the rest of the data collection gets harder, it requires reading operative notes, looking at follow up notes, reading ultrasounds/CTs etc, but if I have lets say a 30 patient group that I need to look at, it will take me roughly 8-10 hours before my entire dataset is complete. Then you need to actually analyze and do stats. And then write. I expect our students to get their hands on this. They can do the data collection with some guidance, but need to learn a bit of medicine to be able to actually do it well. They learn how to collect data, how to do basic stats, how to do basic analysis and then writing. If they are involved in the project in a meaningful way, they should expect to be an author on the paper. If they came up with the idea for the project, they should expect to be first author.
We have a crap load of ongoing clinical trials, prospective studies, industry studies, animal models, device design, etc going on as well. If they have time and/or interest, they are more than welcome to get involved with that stuff, but that is much longer term and certainly publication in that is luck of the draw.
Publication venue ranges from our institution publication to JVS.
). This is for New Haven though, which is a moderate CoL that is in no way comparable to NYC/SF/Boston.
