Clinical research or benchwork??

[rachie1324]

I'm in med school and want to get published so i can get a competitive residency, or at least improve my chances. Should i do clinical research (w/patients) or benchwork (PCR, etc)? I'm completely inexperienced in the lab, but the research coordinator says that shouldn't be a problem -- i just need to decide what i want to do. I also don't have any idea what field i want to go into, except NOT OB/GYN (i have... vaginaphobia... it's very rare). Aside from that, I'm open to anything; I have friends doing both types, and know that I am comfortable working with animals (alive or dead) or tissue samples. Does anyone have personal experience or advice about either type or what would be better??

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[DropkickMurphy]

i have... vaginaphobia... it's very rare

I think the form that presents in med students isn't rare at all......it's just a product of the nature of the vaginas you deal with.

 

[DOapplicant]

OP,

What year are in and when do you hope to publish by?

 

[marcus pupil]

I have the same question. Would u recommend clinical or basic research. Is 10 weeks enough to get published?

 

[qwopty99]

i don't want to be too facetious here, but if in 10 weeks, u can get published into something meaningful (particularly using bench work), then wouldn't someone already have done it?

 

[npage148]

10 weeks. first or second author, most likely not. Supporting author, sure.

 

[logos]

It all depends on what you like to do. I would posit that if you do some clinical research you stand much more likely to be published quickly than with bench research. Bench research takes a lot of time as invariably issues crop up that must be worked through. Some grad students spend 4 years just trying to get enough data to publish.

 

[DNASplicer]

What are YOU interested in??

In brief: talk to docs that do both. Find somthing you enjoy learning about. That will take you far.

In depth: No easy answer here.

Both clinical and basic science research can be challenging.

I am a bench scientist, so I am biased. Yes, it's difficult to get published, but I think in the long run it's much more valued. I mean, come on, these docs reviewing our applications are on to us! They know who really knows what it takes to do research by the applicant's involvement.

I am currently trying to gain more skills in clinical research... and the project I am working on is easy... simply pt chart review (BORING AS HELL) and I have 2 publications on this project in the future already.

However, I know someone else working on a clinical research project who did not get any patients for one of the arms of her study and thus no data and thus no publication.

 

[MNDOC31]

I echo what other have said. Go where your interests are and what fits with your career goals. If you just want a publication for residency help then I would probably advise you to do something clinical where you would typically see results quicker. This can vary though and I admit that I'm bias towards clinical research.

 

[gbwillner]

I'm in med school and want to get published so i can get a competitive residency, or at least improve my chances. Should i do clinical research (w/patients) or benchwork (PCR, etc)? I'm completely inexperienced in the lab, but the research coordinator says that shouldn't be a problem -- i just need to decide what i want to do. I also don't have any idea what field i want to go into, except NOT OB/GYN (i have... vaginaphobia... it's very rare). Aside from that, I'm open to anything; I have friends doing both types, and know that I am comfortable working with animals (alive or dead) or tissue samples. Does anyone have personal experience or advice about either type or what would be better??

Your answer:
CLINICAL RESEARCH

reasoning:
You state in your post you want to do research in order to get a competitive residency. You are in med school and have a very limited time frame. You will NOT be able to pubish anything in the basic sciences that way. you WILL be able to do monkey work tabulating clinical data for 4 weeks and get a first-author paper, provided your mentor is nice enough to allow it. You might be bored while you do it, but it will pay off BIG for you. Let's say you want to go into surgery. you apply to surgery residencies, having spent 2 YEARS publishing a paper in PNAS about mutations sodium channels leading to vaginaphobia. 95% of the time surgeons will know nothing about the subject matter, nor will they have heard of PNAS, a journal with a high impact factor (around 10-12). However, if you spend 4 weeks writing up a paper about how butterfly stitches improve survival over shoelace knots in the American journal of surgical stitching (IP of 0.21) you will have a noticable edge over your peers having contributed something to the literature, even though it was relatively little work.

If you want to go into Pathology or Neuro I would consider wet-bench stuff. Otherwise you are wasting your time.

 

[greg12345]

A surgeon would probably think "PNAS" is a urology journal.

Clinical research all the way, very good chance to get something meaningful (i.e. publishable) done in 10 weeks.

 

[DNASplicer]

Wow, I know people tend to be opinioned on this forum, but speaking as a future surgeon... lots of them (surgeon, I'm talking about) know basic science, comm'on man?

And I must disagree with a previous poster that said it's very difficult to actually get anything published if you do basic science. It does depend on how complicated your project is, but that's true for both clinical and bench work.

I guess it would boil down what are your interests. Because when something needs to get done and you would rather sleep or even worse study (a subject that actually interests you) you gotta like your research.

That's why this clinical research project is so painful. I'd rather by on this site than making graphs or looking up pt info (BORING - I am much more your molecular genetics woman!)

And btw, you might be able to find rotations that encourage part of yuor time spent on a project, hence my current involvement in the boring clinical research project.

 

[gbwillner]

Wow, I know people tend to be opinioned on this forum, but speaking as a future surgeon... lots of them (surgeon, I'm talking about) know basic science, comm'on man?

And I must disagree with a previous poster that said it's very difficult to actually get anything published if you do basic science. It does depend on how complicated your project is, but that's true for both clinical and bench work.

Yeah, we are being very unfair to surgeons... but in general you must admit the clinicians outside of basic science don't need to (and rarely do) follow up with basic science journals.

As far as your comment about getting papers published in basic science... I have to completely disagree. As long as you have adequate controls, negative results are still publishable in clinical papers. For basic science work to be published, there must be some degree of both novelty and insight. Over time, this is getting harder and harder to do. My thesis advisor got his PhD in 18 months when he sequenced a gene in E.Coli. That's wouldn't mean crap today. You'd have to knock it out of a mouse and show phenotype OR show gene function/ interactions with other proteins to have something of interest.

 

[greg12345]

I was just kidding about surgeons...I know a couple who do some pretty good basic science stuff. I guess it would be possible to get published with 10 weeks of basic science work as a 3rd or 4th author if maybe you contributed one or two experiments to a paper...but if you want a project that you can have some semblance of ownership over yet is amenable to producing publishable results in a period of 10 weeks (where you would be the first author), I doubt you could find very many basic science projects that would fulfill those requirements. On the other hand, there would probably be a large number of clinical research projects that could fit those requirements.

 

[DNASplicer]

That's a good point.

You probably won't be a primary author if basic research is what you do, but I don't know how much that matters. It's the impact factor of the journal that is important, at least at our level.

 

[gbwillner]

That's a good point.

You probably won't be a primary author if basic research is what you do, but I don't know how much that matters. It's the impact factor of the journal that is important, at least at our level.

Honestly, the only authorships that matter at ALL are first and last. The rest is filler. Being fourth author means nothing- because there are no standards as to what that means. Maybe all you did was unfreeze a tissue sample and send it in the mail to the first author. Being first author means you were the primary source of thought and usually work to a project. Being last author means you contributed to the financial aspects of the work and guidance to the first author. You are putting your reputation on the line as a last author of a paper and are ultimately responsible for the quality of the paper.

I was third author on a paper that is directly relevant to my thesis. I had to work hard to convince my PI to even allow me to add the paper to my thesis.

 

[Pinkertinkle]

Honestly, the only authorships that matter at ALL are first and last. The rest is filler. Being fourth author means nothing- because there are no standards as to what that means. Maybe all you did was unfreeze a tissue sample and send it in the mail to the first author. Being first author means you were the primary source of thought and usually work to a project. Being last author means you contributed to the financial aspects of the work and guidance to the first author. You are putting your reputation on the line as a last author of a paper and are ultimately responsible for the quality of the paper.

I was third author on a paper that is directly relevant to my thesis. I had to work hard to convince my PI to even allow me to add the paper to my thesis.

I agree. I think authorship drops in value by about 2/3 for every position. Thus 2nd author is about 1/3 as good, 3rd is 1/9, and beyond that is almost nothing. Last is of course as good as first, but not so relevant to us yet.

 

[Surg Path]

I agree. I think authorship drops in value by about 2/3 for every position. Thus 2nd author is about 1/3 as good, 3rd is 1/9, and beyond that is almost nothing. Last is of course as good as first, but not so relevant to us yet.

This depends on the journal. 2nd author (or 2nd to last in some cases) in Nature or NEJM is big stuff. Then again, I can't imagine getting on a nature paper in 10 weeks.

I am biased here as my research has been in basic and translational research, but 10 weeks to publish sounds like a joke to me. By publish, I assume the OP means a peer-reviewed journal? Even a complete no-name no-impact factor peer-reviewed journal will take 4 to 6 weeks just to send in, be reviewed, be sent back, and hopefully be accepted after minor changes. In my experience, reviewers always want you to change something.

My suggestion would be to submit an abstract to a decent meeting. With luck and hard work and a nice mentor this could be done in 10 weeks I think.

 

[Pinkertinkle]

This depends on the journal. 2nd author (or 2nd to last in some cases) in Nature or NEJM is big stuff. Then again, I can't imagine getting on a nature paper in 10 weeks.

I'm just saying 2nd author on Nature would be 1/3 as good as first author on Nature. The absolute values may change, but the relative ratios are about the same.

 

[Surg Path]

Pinkertinkle, I agree with the relative importance of middle authors which you proposed. My point was that being second author can be meaninful. In short, I meant to question this perspective:

Honestly, the only authorships that matter at ALL are first and last. The rest is filler.

 

[blinknoodle]

That's a good point.

You probably won't be a primary author if basic research is what you do, but I don't know how much that matters. It's the impact factor of the journal that is important, at least at our level.

At my level, I always figured any journal was fine so long as you were first author. Shows that you can actually lead and complete a project.