Research Focus

[Invin22]

How important is it to do research and/or get published in the specialty which you ultimately want to go into?

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[OneTyme]

How important is it to do research and/or get published in the specialty which you ultimately want to go into?

Check out the NRMP match data. For each specialty you can see how much research the average applicant had and it show matched vs unmatched.

As far as the having research involved in the same field, that depends on the specialty. You should check out the forums for which ever specialty you are interested in.

http://www.nrmp.org/data/chartingoutcomes2011.pdf

 

[Invin22]

Very useful link, but it only shows quantity of research of matched applicants not the relevance of their research to the specialty for which they are applying.

 

[Phyozo]

How important is it to do research and/or get published in the specialty which you ultimately want to go into?

This question varies greatly depending on the specialty. For the most competitive specialties (derm, rad/onc, plastics), you almost need to have research in those respective field. For most specialties, research is not a requirement, but can help you tremendously in becoming more competitive. For fields that are less competitive (EM, internal, peds, psych) they like seeing that you've done some research / received some publications, especially if you apply to big name academic centers. Of course it's better to do the research in the specialty you're going into, but for less competitive places, it doesn't seem to be a big deal...they just wanna see that you did SOME research. There was a thread about this awhile back with a great idea...if you're debating between two or more fields, try to pick a research topic that can be approached from any of those fields.

 

[Invin22]

Thanks! I'm not sure what I want to go into at this point, though I am considering some fields which are considered highly competitive.

 

[Hemichordate]

How come they don't have any data for ophthalmology on that link?

 

[OneTyme]

How come they don't have any data for ophthalmology on that link?

Ophthalmology applicants participate in their own match process. (At least I think that is how it works. Honestly, I never even looked in to it until just now.) Here is a link for some stats on the match last year.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218141

Or there is this link that shows the changes in averages over the last decade.

http://www.sfmatch.org/residency/ophthalmology/about_match/match_report.pdf