I’ve done these. Definitely takes time if you’re new. If you have a PI that cranks out a lot of these, it can go quite fast. By definition you need a team so you can have multiple people screening papers for inclusion. The papers pretty much write themselves though. You do cut out the whole IRB thing, but there’s a lot of lit to dig through and a lot of writing to do. Great projects for students though - forces you to learn the literature around a given topic.
Step one is finding a faculty mentor at your shop that has done these before. If you can’t find someone, then look for other kinds of clinical research. My first paper was giving a survey instrument to specific clinic patients and then analyzing to find potential impacts of those surveyed elements in their treatment. Learned a ton, presented and published in M1. So you don’t have to do SR/MA; those are just nice easy targets for students. That said, there’s a lot of crap papers out there. I do kind of roll my eyes whenever I see a SR/MA in a journal, especially when it’s just reviewing a bunch of retrospective or other non randomized data.
Great easy papers for students:
1) case reports. Low hanging fruit. Try to title so it doesn’t look like a case report if possible (some journals prohibit this).
2) SR/MA as discussed here. Needs good mentor both for guidance and so it can get published.
3) SEER database studies. There’s a steep learning curve in mining this thing, but once you get good at it you can bang out lots of easy papers and you can get yourself authorship on many more papers when you help friends do papers of their own. I had a buddy in Med school cranked out 15+ papers this way, plus tons of his own. Basically the formula is you find some rare obscure kind of cancer in your desired field and then you mine the database for info. You can also look for prior seer studies that are old and do an update, especially if it’s a tumor with new treatment options.
4) chart reviews - bread and butter student projects. Pretty easy to find these.
5) unpublished resident/faculty projects. If you befriend some residents, you may find they have a handful of posters or presentations they never turned into a manuscript. These are usually finished projects and you can use their poster and presentation slides to write a manuscript. In the beginning, just ask for second authorship if they’ll let you do it. Kind of a win win - they get a nice first author pub; you get a turnkey publication you can crank out in a weekend and submit soon after. Some may even tell you to take first authorship, especially if the residents are headed to private practice and don’t care about academic CV stripes anymore.
