How much research is really needed to match NSG??

[Zibob]

Hi all,

I am a current M1 at a low-mid tier? MD school in the midwest. I am wondering how much research is really needed to match into NSG. My school just recently hired a new neurosurgeon to start up a new department and eventually residency program. I have already met with and spoken with him and was hoping to start doing some research but since the program is just in its infancy there wasn't really anything there. I have met with another basic science researcher at my school and will be doing some research over the summer involving glioblastoma and peptide inhibitors. I just really don't know what else I need to be doing to set myself up for the match research-wise. The mean number of abstracts, presentations, and publications for those who matched NSG is 23.4 which just seems insane to me and is sort of discouraging. I'm not really dead set on matching into top tier programs or anything. I've never really been a fan of research and just want to practice medicine most likely here in the midwest. So i'm just wondering how much research is truly needed to match at all and what can I do over the next three years to make that happen. Thanks for all the help!

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[AzBasRad]

Productive NSG (or any surgical sub-speciality) faculty and residents can pump out >10 pubmed indexed papers per year, mostly retrospective chart reviews. If you join such a team early or take a research year, its not impossible to reach that number.

Also that the same research topic can be presented as an abstract or poster at a conference before submitting for publication to journal. Thus, that 23.4 number is not equivalent to the number of unique projects.

 

[Banco]

23 is for research "items" (abstracts, posters, pubs, in press, submitted etc.) So it is indeed an inflated number to a large extent. Regardless, you do want to have a couple quality papers at least; the research from those will likely yield poster presentations and abstracts at multiple meetings. As usual, quality is still > quantity.

 

[efle]

The Neurosurgery Match: A Bibliometric Analysis of 206 First-Year Residents - PubMed

H-index is a powerful research predictor of matching into neurosurgical research institutions and can be improved by starting research early, targeting high impact journals, and participating in original clinical and laboratory investigations.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

people list a lot of entries, but usually have their name on only a couple indexed papers

 

[Qwerty122]

The neurosurgery applicant's "arms race": analysis of medical student publication in the Neurosurgery Residency Match - PubMed

"Total publications per neurosurgery intern (mean ± SD) based on PubMed and Google Scholar were 5.5 ± 0.6 in 2018 (1.7 ± 0.3, 2009; 2.1 ± 0.3, 2011; 2.6 ± 0.4, 2014; 3.8 ± 0.4, 2016), compared to 18.3 research products based on ChOM. In 2018, the mean numbers of publications were as follows: neurosurgery-specific publications per intern, 4.3 ± 0.6; first/last author publications, 2.1 ± 0.3; neurosurgical first/last author publications, 1.6 ± 0.2; basic science publications, 1.5 ± 0.2; and clinical research publications, 4.0 ± 0.5."

 

[aaronrodgers]

23 is for research "items" (abstracts, posters, pubs, in press, submitted etc.) So it is indeed an inflated number to a large extent. Regardless, you do want to have a couple quality papers at least; the research from those will likely yield poster presentations and abstracts at multiple meetings. As usual, quality is still > quantity.

We can also put submitted manuscripts as a research item to add towards the count?? Did not know that

 

[Banco]

We can also put submitted manuscripts as a research item to add towards the count?? Did not know that

Yeah lol, and most of them don't come to fruition.