First-author med students: what are your responsibilities?

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Skarl

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For med students working on your own first-author paper as part of a research project, what is expected of you from your faculty mentor? I want to get a reference point for my own project, which I am largely completing by myself (writing it, creating the figures, interpreting results) with pointers from my mentor/co-authors ad hoc.

Related to this: how common are excel charts in peer-reviewed publications? I always assumed most figures you see in scholarly publications are created with specialized software (e.g. SAS, STATA, R), but after consulting with our statistician I was told Excel would work fine.
 
What you describe is what is expected of any first author. Your idea/more or less and majority executed by you. Other authors should help (I.e. making tables, editing manuscript, collecting data) but it will seem like a one person show. A good senior author will give you constant oversight and tips especially if you’re a student and need more assistance.

to make tables I usually make it in Excel and then convert to a word document. The tables in journals are then made by converting things into whatever style the journal is in.
 
I did everything.

+1. My experience as well. first author typically does everything, senior author will edit/answer questions, and middle authors MAYBE edit the final draft prior to submission and bask in the glory of an additional line on their CV lol

If you want to be productive in research, you have to take the bull by the horns and do it yourself or else it will never get done
 
You have to do all the gruntwork...writing, editing, making figures, etc but they should really be the ones who come up with the idea. As a med student you don't have enough knowledge or experience to know what is or is not a good research question.

I got a first author pub in a very good journal as a med student by basically just being the one who put in the time to make the project happen. I had close to 0 understanding of the actual material.
 
You have to do all the gruntwork...writing, editing, making figures, etc but they should really be the ones who come up with the idea. As a med student you don't have enough knowledge or experience to know what is or is not a good research question.

I got a first author pub in a very good journal as a med student by basically just being the one who put in the time to make the project happen. I had close to 0 understanding of the actual material.

Med students should definitely help come up with ideas. PIs can help push you in the right direction and determine which ideas are worth pursuing. As a med student and first author, you should have close to a 100% understanding of the material. It is academically dishonest (almost fraudulent) to write a paper without understanding the content.
 
For med students working on your own first-author paper as part of a research project, what is expected of you from your faculty mentor? I want to get a reference point for my own project, which I am largely completing by myself (writing it, creating the figures, interpreting results) with pointers from my mentor/co-authors ad hoc.

Related to this: how common are excel charts in peer-reviewed publications? I always assumed most figures you see in scholarly publications are created with specialized software (e.g. SAS, STATA, R), but after consulting with our statistician I was told Excel would work fine.
Each journal will require all authors to sign an agreement attesting to their roles in the publication creation process. Some may even ask for specific details on roles. Granted, before you even start working for a research mentor, you should have gotten to a point where authorship should be discussed.

No specialized software is required. Excel to Word is fine.
 
Med students should definitely help come up with ideas. PIs can help push you in the right direction and determine which ideas are worth pursuing. As a med student and first author, you should have close to a 100% understanding of the material. It is academically dishonest (almost fraudulent) to write a paper without understanding the content.

lol...as a med student I should have known MRI physics and how to diagnose different liver tumors?
 
I was first-author on the project I did during summer after M1. Basically did the entire chart review of 500+ patients and collected the data, and then worked with my mentor to do the statistical analysis and make the figures, etc. For the manuscript I wrote most of the results/methods section and kind of took a stab at the intro/discussion sections but my mentor had to mostly re-write these because I had no experience with that lol.
 
Respectfully, if you are writing a paper on MRI physics and diagnosing tumors, then you should understand both of those concepts. Your stage of training shouldn't matter.

and in doing so I would have been the first med student to have mastered those concepts that actually took me 6 years of post-grad training
 
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