How do people do so much research/get so many publications?

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MD-2021

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I'm an M1 at a low-mid tier US MD school, not really sure what specialty I'm interested in yet and possibly considering some competitive fields like Ophtho, ENT, and Ortho. But I'm really confused as to how I can possibly gain enough research experience to apply. In the AAMC Match stats, it says that matched applicants have an average of 8-9 publications, which to me is unfathomable.

I've never really been interested in research, I very lightly dabbled in some basic science research during undergrad and was never published. I'm just unsure of where to begin and what to do.

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that place on the application is listed as "pubs, posters, abstracts" or something like that. Most people in a competitive field with an average of 10 "pubs" is most of the time more like ~2 actual publications, 1-2 case reports, and a bunch of posters and presentations at conferences.
 
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Gap year. Which is unfortunately all too common these days for people applying to competitive specialties.


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How does a medical student with a gap year even match? Expert dick sucking skills?

Pretty sure gap year refers to a research year that’s usually taken between 3rd and 4th years. It’s fairly common in competitive specialties that require a lot of productive research in their field. I don’t think research year is needed for those who are already cranking out papers and presentations in the specialty of interest from first year onwards.

But for those who were undecided until they destroyed Step 1 and honored their rotations, they lack productive research in the specialty of interest and have to take a research year to catch up.
 
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that place on the application is listed as "pubs, posters, abstracts" or something like that. Most people in a competitive field with an average of 10 "pubs" is most of the time more like ~2 actual publications, 1-2 case reports, and a bunch of posters and presentations at conferences.
These numbers are mostly meaningless. In addition to the above, they are also based on self-reported numbers by applicants to the NRMP, not even data collected from ERAS (although it asks you to give the number of things you put on ERAS). People also usually include college research too. My number was in the 30s and my research record, while good, is nothing *that* special.
 
You can often times just re-submit the same work to multiple conferences with different titles as well. It's rarely caught and unless it's the only project you ever worked on it's unlikely that you'd be asked about the same project twice during interviews. If asked it's also very easy to just say "Oh yeah this was a continuating of this same project but we added one extra variable".

It's not just students, when faculty members say "Dr. Big Dick has 5000000 peer reviewed articles", what that actually means is that "Dr. Big Dick probably wrote a lot of papers when he was a young attending trying to make his name, but now his residents, fellows and junior attending all just put his name on stuff because that's just how things work".
 
Yeah as above, that number refers to pubs, posters, presentations, etc. If you only do 2 or 3 pubs, you will hopefully have submitted those earlier as either posters or presentations. You may present one at a local or school conference in addition to a national meeting (assuming this is ok with the conference organizers). If you’re active in a department, you may find yourself on some projects as an n-th author which would also go into that number. You will also list anything from undergrad as well which also goes into that number.

Charting Outcomes is just a rough guide and doesn’t really dive into the data in a really meaningful way. The actual numbers don’t matter much, but they do tell the story that research productivity is very common among successful applicants.
 
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