Are publications pre-med/early in pre-clinical years valued for residencies?

[bankedsynapse]

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Incoming M1 currently thinking ahead to residencies, with the Match going on. Does having many pubs before starting med school give you any sort of 'head start' when it comes to the research needed for competitive residencies? I'm assuming the answer is they count for little and offer no real advantage, but would the answer change if all of the research were in the same specialty? Or if they were first author pubs? For example, if all of my research and pubs were in cardiology and I were gunning for a cardiology residency, would some being from the pre-med years be seen as 'better', or are these more or less ignored?

Also, I have some manuscripts that will likely be published while I am an M1 due to how long some of the authors are taking to revise, etc. If pre-med pubs are 'devalued', compared to those published while in med school, would these share the same fate? Mainly I'm just hoping that if I have to assist with revisions during M1 I'm not wasting my time.

 

[GoSpursGo]

Pubs are forever and absolutely count. You eventually need to have pubs in your specialty of choice, but long story short, yes you have a head start.

It is much more high yield to make revisions to an existing manuscript than to start a new project from ground zero.

 

[operaman]

Yes they count, not just for residency but for fellowship and for faculty positions if you want an academic job. Nobody will care about the year, and given the lag time in publishing it’s often hard to tell when the work was actually done without digging into the paper itself.

Yes you will want specialty specific papers once you have decided what your desired field will be. So long as you’re reasonably productive, your cv tells the story for you - a number of early pubs in unrelated field followed by a growing number of pubs and projects in the specialty of choice.

Never forget that the most important thing will be your academics, so make sure you’ve got M1 truly dialed in before devoting time to other projects. Failed classes or a failed step exam will undo the match benefits of research in an instant. Once you get a couple exams under your belt, you’ll know what it takes for you personally to perform well and if that allows some time for other projects, go for it. If you’re one of those folks whose full court press effort barely gets you to passing, then you’ll want to focus on classes and boards and save research for protected time periods.