Research/Publications

[Symphonies]

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Hey hSDN! Before I start, I just wanted to say that I understand that research definitely isn't integral towards dental school admission and should mostly be done only if you're interested in it-- however, I've never actually done any before and am going to starting this summer. Still, I'm considering some things in case I actually do end up enjoying doing research.

For the dents out there (didn't want to spam the pre-dent forum), is there a certain area of research that you need to pursue in order for it to have an impact? Take for example, this summer I'm going to be doing research on neurons and so forth. In short, my topic doesn't really pertain to dentistry. Hypothetically speaking, if I managed to publish a paper on this (this is such a stretch but bear with me) would this be something notable to indicate?

Also, the idea of a publication has been thrown around, but I'm not too sure about what that entails as well. If possible, can someone give me a tldr on what it is? Thanks in advance!

 

[DrYoda]

I'm probably not the ideal person to answer this given I'm a MD and not a dentist. However I did research both as an undergrad and a medical student that had close to nothing to do with my specialty (emergency medicine). At least in my experience being both~10ish med school and residency interviews it never came up.

 

[URHere]

Do research in whatever field is both (1) available and (2) enjoyable for you. When it comes to admissions, research is impressive because it shows that a student is able to commit to a project long-term and is able to think independently/scientifically. If you are able to publish or present your research, that's even better because it means that you can organize information and present it intelligently to someone else. Of course, it's always a bonus when you are researching something that an interviewer will care about, but no one will fault you for something unrelated at this stage of the game and any experience would be worth mentioning on an application (even if you don't manage to publish).

As for a publication, think of it as a cross between a lab report and an english paper. Every project starts with a main research question, and once the question has been answered, a publication is a way to share that knowledge with the rest of the research world. Usually, scientific papers will include an introduction with relevant background information (and plenty of references), a methods section describing how the experiments were done, a results section describing the actual data, and a discussion section where the results can be interpreted and possible meanings/mechanisms can be discussed. After a publication is written and edited, it gets submitted to a scientific journal. After that, a number of scientific experts will read the paper, look at the data, and decide if they think it's important (and well-done) enough to be published in that journal. If the paper is accepted, it will be published. If not, it's time to submit to a different journal and try again (or fix any problems with the original research). Data collection for a single paper often takes several years, and it isn't uncommon for the actual process of writing and submitting a paper to take 6+ months.