Unfortunately in many cases.
I mean, medical literature generally provides few enlightenments and >99% is relevant garbage. The “high impact” papers boil down to epidemiology research that demonstrate cancer IS bad, poverty IS bad and being hospitalized IS bad. The other “high impact” papers then end up being review articles that surmise the epidemiology studies that being sick and poor IS bad and there are future studies to be done. None of that is earth shattering. Then of course, within my field, all the “high impact” trials are studies that either test a terrible hypothesis AND are negative or studies that test the hypothesis that most physicians don’t know jack **** about illness by testing the two most common treatments and find… they are the same.
I have never felt more validated in my utter disdain for research.
It’s not so bad, but sometimes it’s like eating coffee grounds to get the caffeine
I mean, research itself is fun. Asking and answering questions is fun. It’s better than doing the >90% of medicine which is routine and protocol based.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I agree. I actually enjoyed the investigation process of my required research as a trainee. It was really cool to look into a question I genuinely had and maybe even get to answer it. But then the IRB had their hoops to jump through. And the PhD research consultant gave about 30 minutes of input that they demanded second author status for. And the journals have their asinine standards for submission. And endless other annoyances. Basically everything from your post. Again, I agree lol
Research in general is fine, wonderful even. Aim your disdain towards the MDs who dip their toes in the water and then claim to be experts for the sake of ego or career advancement. For most medical students, this is the research you are exposed to the most, and I don't blame you for hating it. Working with engineers and basic scientists is an absolute breath of fresh air compared to clinical folks. In my experience, purely clinical researchers suffer massively from the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially surgeons. Last year I listened to an orthopedic surgeon give an impassioned speech to a room of ~50 scientists during a PhD thesis defense about how one cannot draw a conclusion from N = 5. It was a plate assay with an absurdly tight distribution for all groups and p < 0.0001. The man, who is full professor at an elite medical school, genuinely thought he was educating everyone. If you're wondering, yes, his publication record is filled with 10+ articles/year titled things like, "Bones and Moans: Pain in the Era of Minimally Invasive Joint Distraction Arthroscopy" (fake title, but you get it). I'd love to say that the "cerebral" physicians (e.g., ID, Heme/Onc, Nephro, etc...)do a better job, but they generally don't unless they actually run a lab.
They often have fees that are arbitrarily imposed.
Writing is writing. Not all people view publishing in journals as hard science. Some people like writing editorial pieces, etc. If you're a basic science kind of guy with an IQ through the roof, more power to you. But don't fault people for pursuing their interests.
True. You gotta give the reviewers what they want.
I'm fine with writing, but there are better venues. If these articles need to exist that's fine, but we shouldn't index them the same way we index a breakthrough study in the NEJM or a novel mechanistic finding in Nature. These articles are mostly ego fluff. No one is actually sitting down in their office and opening up Academic Medicine to read "Moving Fast by Thinking Slow: Lessons from the ED" by Dr. Needsapub.
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the purpose of research? Is it to get "pubs" to get into residency (or other academic advancement/etc), or is it to advance our understanding of the world around us and improve patient care? The problem with all the fluff and garbage stuff created by people with the first approach is that it actually harms the efforts of the people with the second approach.
How do you go about asking editors if they may have interest in your manuscript? Do you email them with the title alone, do you provide the abstract, or some other method?
You can email them. That being said, editors are busy and many journals have editorial reviews just for this purpose. This is one of the “metrics” that journals love to publish and highlight. “Time to first decision” is usually a reflection of that. If the acceptance rate is <10-15% and the time to first decision is ~1 week, that’s because 85% of the articles underwent an editorial review and were told to move on within a couple of days. My personal best was 12 hours from clicking the “submit” button to get a letter to get lost.
I just email them and give them a capsule description of the findings.
A collaborator of mine told me that he got a rejection within seconds of hitting the submit button!
How many times do you usually have a paper rejected before just letting it die?
Depends. If you ran out of funds/time and the story is complete, I never let it die.
The Moscow International Journal of Informative Pediatrics
Couldn't find that one in JCR. But there is "Medical Hypotheses", the journal where you can just write whatever the f-ck you feel. It's impact factor isn't that bad (4.7). This is was also the journal that published masks during COVID were harmful because they caused CO2 retention and hypoxemia, so you can literally publish anything in it.
Lol I made it up facetiously
I know. But I didn’t make up the journal Medical Hypotheses where you can publish why heart transplantation makes you crazy.
This is all so perfect that I wish I had written it. MDs are not PhDs and need to stop pretending to be them.
I love this so much. Most of us have zero formal training in research and get taught how to do it by people who also have no formal training in research. I hate that this is a requirement and there’s so much fluff out there that doesn’t even say anything .
Gotta wonder how much of that impact factor is people citing papers to prove them incorrect, essentially the academic version of "Cunningham's Law."
Who knows. Impact factors are intentionally fudged anyway so it doesn’t really mean anything.
