How do people get so many publications from doing research?

[Hzreio]

Clinical research can be literally anything from a case series/retrospective chart review (which if you're efficient, can be done within a few months) to randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials (which usually are recruiting and collecting data for months to years).

In general, it is faster to get published doing clinical research than bench research.

My first research project took about 4-5 years from conception til publication. Probably would've been faster with a different mentor (who set deadlines and had a goal of publication from the start), but it still took time. My second I jumped into the middle of, but it still took about 2 years from when I started to publication. My third I did over the course of about 9 months (it was a subanalysis of data I was collecting for a bigger project, and I did all the data analysis myself). My fourth project I'm having a hard time getting published and have been working on it for almost 2 years; my fifth we are also having a hard time getting published, but have been working on it for about 18 months. So even project within clinical research can be hugely variable on how quickly they can get done and published.

Working on a project that is difficult to publish for over 12 months seems like some kind of med student he’ll… props to you lol

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Hzreio]

The most obvious answer here is luck. But, strategy and finding the right people are essential too.

Background:

• I had 20+ publications (high impact factor journals) before submitting ERAS. No PhD. This, plus my extra degree, made me stand out from every other applicant.
• I had the high Step scores and all Honors/AOA, but if you are gunning for top 10 programs/hospitals, assume every applicant has those at baseline. Thus, you need to differentiate yourself.
• All my interview questions were on my research and my extra degree. Quantity and quality matters.
• Quantity: People that think abstracts or posters are on the same level as pubs or oral presentations (not posters) are just wrong. Submitted status also means nothing. If it's not in publication, it doesn't count.
• Quality:
  • First or second author only - otherwise it is questionable if you even did anything or were just put on the author list for kicks.
  • High impact journals in the specialty of your research; not open access pay-to-publish, or unheard of BS journals
  • Case reports mean next to nothing; you need full manuscripts, doesn't matter if retrospective or prospective

The How:

• None of this came easy. Indeed luck was part of it, but I worked my butt off to get the job done
• First, write off bench research; this is a waste of time when you are going after quantity; only go after clinical research
• Second, finding a "good" mentor is the hardest step in this process
  • Good does not just mean the chair of the department or the nice attitude PI
  • You need a PI who publishes; go on Pubmed, search for the PI by name, and ensure he/she has published in the past year; if not, pass, don't work with this person
  • Every institution/hospital has a directory of faculty; go through each person, look at what they have published on Pubmed, see if it is interesting to you and then reach out via email; do this for two or three faculty members
  • Then, treat this like a business/job interview; dress up, meet with him/her in person, be forward about your goals, list what value you can provide to the PI's group, etc. At the same time, get a sense of how the PI operates (you are interviewing them too)
• Once you have found the mentor or multiple mentors, you need to learn how to do research - the whole process
  • This is where a lot of people struggle; just because you find a mentor doesn't mean you are golden
  • Do you actually know to review the literature, how to write, what an IRB proposal is, what the manuscript submission process, etc.?
  • I did not (no one does), but thankfully my PI had a senior medical student who was the lead of the research group; he took me under his wing and taught me how to become a prolific and efficient researcher
• Next, project ideas; a good PI has limitless ideas and is always sending them out via email or discussing in monthly meetings; you are not expected to create your own ideas; if the PI does expect this, then leave - that is not a good PI; you are new and need to be brought up gradually to this level
• Take on your first project and get it done asap; speed/efficiency are key; forget going out to a movie or taking a weekend trip; do the work, learn, etc.

The PI: must be efficient, full of ideas, have a track record of publishing prolifically and frequently, and has worked/currently works with other med students or post-docs. Not his/her first rodeo.

After the first or few papers, then auto-pilot kicks in. You begin to tag-team projects with other med studs, so you get to be on their paper and them on yours. Each paper published can turn into multiple posters or oral presentations. Then, you become the senior med student, train younger med studs who help you with your papers, get grants/funding, work on bigger projects, and now as an attending the auto pilot keeps going.

This is not common. I understand that part of this was luck no doubt. But, if you lack initiative, which many med studs do, you will never get beyond 1 or 2 pubs at best. Take your time and seek out a good mentor first. You will know when you find one and it is not easy.

Tbh this level of quality/quantity is unrealistic for most students.

 

[Lawpy]

Tbh this level of quality/quantity is unrealistic for most students.

Most students can follow some of the steps above to publish even one paper.

 

[Hzreio]

Most students can follow some of the steps above to publish even one paper.

I agree, especially w the how part

 

[ChordaEpiphany]

Tbh this level of quality/quantity is unrealistic for most students.

Depends on institution. If you are at a top academic institution, non-tenured professors are hungry to publish and tenured professors have a steady stream of projects. 20+ papers will depend on the field as well. Even among clinical pubs, surgical pubs tend to be even lower effort, and 20+ in a research year is feasible. The key is finding the right mentor. I know plenty of Assistant and Associate Professors who would gladly welcome me into their "research practice" and work on some project that I have to build from the ground up, but they have nothing cooking on the backburner that you can hop onto and haven't published in 2 years. These people are not research professors. Do not work with these people.

I started my PhD working purely in the lab with one first author paper to my name. I went 2.5 years with no publications. Tbh I was very bitter and jealous of people who seemed to accumulate publications effortlessly. I was teaching undergrads with better publication records than I had. By my 2nd year I had honed some key skills and started to offer my services to other people's projects. Suddenly middle-author publications were flowing. Then my PhD led me to clinical contacts. Those clinical contacts were prolific researchers at a top institution (20+ papers/year). As long as I was working on the tough basic science, they were willing to include me on some of the more "fluffy" clinical projects, things like small reviews, opinion articles, etc... Stuff that goes on Google Scholar and is a "publication" but isn't really a publication. These days I find myself sometimes turning down opportunities to publish.

It's really all about positioning. Med students are often very bitter about this, but it's just your first exposure to how most endeavors work in our current world and economy. Position and connections >> hard work and effort. Opportunities can be somewhat random. At least in medicine we can vet our mentors and ensure they are producing something of meaningful output.

 

[Lawpy]

Depends on institution. If you are at a top academic institution, non-tenured professors are hungry to publish and tenured professors have a steady stream of projects. 20+ papers will depend on the field as well. Even among clinical pubs, surgical pubs tend to be even lower effort, and 20+ in a research year is feasible. The key is finding the right mentor. I know plenty of Assistant and Associate Professors who would gladly welcome me into their "research practice" and work on some project that I have to build from the ground up, but they have nothing cooking on the backburner that you can hop onto and haven't published in 2 years. These people are not research professors. Do not work with these people.

I started my PhD working purely in the lab with one first author paper to my name. I went 2.5 years with no publications. Tbh I was very bitter and jealous of people who seemed to accumulate publications effortlessly. I was teaching undergrads with better publication records than I had. By my 2nd year I had honed some key skills and started to offer my services to other people's projects. Suddenly middle-author publications were flowing. Then my PhD led me to clinical contacts. Those clinical contacts were prolific researchers at a top institution (20+ papers/year). As long as I was working on the tough basic science, they were willing to include me on some of the more "fluffy" clinical projects, things like small reviews, opinion articles, etc... Stuff that goes on Google Scholar and is a "publication" but isn't really a publication. These days I find myself sometimes turning down opportunities to publish.

It's really all about positioning. Med students are often very bitter about this, but it's just your first exposure to how most endeavors work in our current world and economy. Position and connections >> hard work and effort. Opportunities can be somewhat random. At least in medicine we can vet our mentors and ensure they are producing something of meaningful output.

Yes i agree with this, it’s largely about finding the right people who are also good mentors. I don’t think this is unique to top/upper mid tier schools (although of course, those schools attract those high caliber researcher attendings), but i can definitely say on both the med and even pure phd side, there’s a lot of terrible faculty and awful mentors out there that makes the research experience just straight up garbage. Finding the right, productive mentor who publishes regularly is so key and critical both for a good research experience and to develop the key skillsets critical for churning out huge numbers of papers

 

[Hzreio]

Depends on institution. If you are at a top academic institution, non-tenured professors are hungry to publish and tenured professors have a steady stream of projects. 20+ papers will depend on the field as well. Even among clinical pubs, surgical pubs tend to be even lower effort, and 20+ in a research year is feasible. The key is finding the right mentor. I know plenty of Assistant and Associate Professors who would gladly welcome me into their "research practice" and work on some project that I have to build from the ground up, but they have nothing cooking on the backburner that you can hop onto and haven't published in 2 years. These people are not research professors. Do not work with these people.

I started my PhD working purely in the lab with one first author paper to my name. I went 2.5 years with no publications. Tbh I was very bitter and jealous of people who seemed to accumulate publications effortlessly. I was teaching undergrads with better publication records than I had. By my 2nd year I had honed some key skills and started to offer my services to other people's projects. Suddenly middle-author publications were flowing. Then my PhD led me to clinical contacts. Those clinical contacts were prolific researchers at a top institution (20+ papers/year). As long as I was working on the tough basic science, they were willing to include me on some of the more "fluffy" clinical projects, things like small reviews, opinion articles, etc... Stuff that goes on Google Scholar and is a "publication" but isn't really a publication. These days I find myself sometimes turning down opportunities to publish.

It's really all about positioning. Med students are often very bitter about this, but it's just your first exposure to how most endeavors work in our current world and economy. Position and connections >> hard work and effort. Opportunities can be somewhat random. At least in medicine we can vet our mentors and ensure they are producing something of meaningful output.

“Positions and connections >> hard work and effort” yep sounds about right

 

[ChordaEpiphany]

“Positions and connections >> hard work and effort” yep sounds about right

Yup. This is the world, but it's actually worse in any other career path. At least here you can balance mediocre research with good grades, evals, step scores, letters, etc... Anyone can manage a single publication, and with a single publication you can probably match any specialty with more objective measures, like step score or grades, just not at a top-tier program. From a pure work : payoff ratio, medicine is obviously a bad choice, but it is very secure if you're willing to put in the work.

No one in medicine languishes (yet). You'll "fail" into a more lucrative practice (community vs. academic medicine). Compare this to other careers. Literally anything outside of pathways like consulting, finance, law, and big tech pretty much has a ceiling of influence and compensation far lower than medicine and you have basically no way to prove yourself outside of some manager's subjective evaluation of you. So position and connections can't even be balanced by hard work and effort on universal opportunities (like grades and step scores). Even the other "top" society careers, as listed above, have a pretty high probability of cutting you out or burning you out, and all the advancement is based on subjective evals from the sort of people who go into... consulting, finance, law, and big tech. I mean, I know a lot of people who went into medicine vs. consulting/finance/law and for all the good people in each industry, there are just so many more absolute deplorables in the latter industries, and those are the people deciding your fate.

There are a lot of reasons to be salty about the way we do things in medicine. The training pathway is too long. The opportunity cost is too high. The missed time with loved ones is too much. However, it's objectively one of the most meritocratic careers out there.

 

[mvenus929]

Working on a project that is difficult to publish for over 12 months seems like some kind of med student he’ll… props to you lol

I mean, I'm not a med student and the project is not a priority for me right now, so I haven't been pushing to get it done. The first 12 months of the project were designing and collecting data. The other members of the team also have other projects and haven't been pushing to get it done, so right now, it's sitting there waiting for me to get back and reassess what journal might be a good fit for it.

 

[Lawpy]

I mean, I'm not a med student and the project is not a priority for me right now, so I haven't been pushing to get it done. The first 12 months of the project were designing and collecting data. The other members of the team also have other projects and haven't been pushing to get it done, so right now, it's sitting there waiting for me to get back and reassess what journal might be a good fit for it.

Can relate to this surprisingly well