<p>I keep hearing that med school want research but they want published research. Well i am an undergraduate student and this seems impossible to find. I have found plenty of research positions and have a volunteer position right now. </p>
<p>How do i publish when i am volunteering?</p>
<p>A family friend is a doctor working for the medical board of California, and he has published in a lot of well respected journals. Anyways he said that he would help me publish like he did but will this work for med schools?</p>
<p>Any suggestions or advice is appreciated.
thank you!</p>
<p>I believe you must find a position as research assistant and work on a project (either independent or with a team of postdocs) either assigned to you by a PI or devised by yourself. You must conduct original research either in the lab or clinic - these positions are hard to get. Even then, there’s no guarantee of getting published - the PI might just overlook you in the list of authors or the paper may not make it out of peer review.</p>
<p>It’s very uncommon for undergrads to publish unless they hook up with a very active lab with multiple projects underway. (It can take several years to garner enough data to be able to write a paper, esp for a high impact journal. And there are research projects that fizzle and produce no usable results. Science isn’t a straight -forward line of progress. There are lots of zigs along the way…) </p>
<p>Med schools want applicants to have research experience (bench or clinical–your choice), but they really don’t expect applicants to have major publications.</p>
<p>Unless you are applying to MD/PhD programs, research is optional for med school admissions (regular MD, that is) and thus comes after clinical experience in terms of priority. And as already mentioned it’s even harder to get published so don’t worry too much about it. Also, among undergrads who do get a publication, they’re usually 2nd author or lower since they probably worked on the project under a grad student or post-doc. Getting a 1st author publication requires you to essentially have your own research project, which most PIs aren’t willing to give to undergrads. So don’t worry if you don’t have any research experience when applying to MD programs; it’s the clinical experience and GPA/MCAT that really count.</p>
<p>Yeah, the above posters are right. It’s very difficult to get anything above a second or third authorship in your undergraduate years. For instance, as a senior in high school, I was very fortunate to get to be third author on a manuscript sent in for publication (for an internship I did) but as with most papers, it wasn’t accepted for publication. Generally, it’s easier to look for summer internships that are funded by some program or scholarship. In those labs, it is more likely you’d be conducting independent research. </p>
<p>@WayOutWestMom, it won’t take “several years” to get enough data for a paper - not in science research anyway. It took me two months of intensive work to get my data and it was enough for a paper (that was the end of my internship). If I really wanted to get enough data for a good paper with a good chance to be accepted for publication, I would have had to work maybe one or two more months to close up all the loose ends. So maybe around four months if you work really hard. Postdocs usually churn out two or three papers a year, I believe. Some do more but they work on them concurrently.</p>
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<p>Not sure I would concur. According to amcas, ~50% of all med matriculants have some type of research on their app. (Sure, that means that 50% don’t.) But at the top tier MD schools, research is nearly a requirement since they are, after all, major research med schools.</p>
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<p>Pton–I’m married to a research scientist who has over 200 pubs. Many of our friends are research scientists (in chemistry, physics, material sciences, space sciences, electrical engineering, with the occasional computational biologist thrown in for good measure.) I work at an independent basic medical science research lab (principally immunology, but we do other stuff too) where part of my job is to track publications by our research staff. (To measure their productivity and scientific impact, among other things-- data which are then used to in promotion and retention decisions. Among the data I track is time from proposal to publication.) </p>
<p>Maybe if you’re working in a group with an on-going project you can get a poster or a minor paper out of few months of data, but typically the process takes much longer than that, esp if you’re working with animal or human subjects. Or have to design and build your own equipment. Or have to wait for equipment availability. (High energy physics experimenters often have to wait 18 months-10 years in a queue just to have their experiments run on the big colliders.)</p>
<p>Hmm. That’s interesting to note. Thank you for your insight, WayOutWestMom. Perhaps I worked in a different type of lab. It was a wet cancer research lab primarily using techniques like western blot, immunocyto, etc. While some experiments required nude mice, those still only took around 8 weeks to complete after injection with glioma xenografts. It would take a further week or so to process the brain sections onto slides for immunohisto. We used equipment already made so that simplified the process (gel electrophoresis machines, ordered antibodies, etc.). I still keep up with publications from that lab and the research professor I researched under puts out about 3 papers per year that are published (at least those I can find on PubMed). If your experiment is centered on Westerns, it doesn’t take that long to get results and then you can supplement those with immunohisto and migration assays for in vivo data. Of course, it is extended by a few months if you don’t get the data you want, but most of the people I worked with had clearly thought out the process beforehand and they got their data readily.</p>
<p>it also depends on the size of the lab, not just the field or the techniques.</p>
<p>The takeaway point is that med schools won’t put much weight in someone without a pub unless they’ve been doing work for a LONG time. Research is too varied from field to field and lab to lab. I was in one group where I got 2 papers in 2 months by analyzing data from a clinical trial. The clinical trial itself is 1 paper and it took like 8 years from inception to publication so even within one lab you can get very different speeds.</p>
<p>Your example is of an on-going project, Ptontiger…which as I mentioned above takes less time for results. You’re also only considering a very small part of the overall scientific process and skipping over a whole lot of critical steps.</p>
<p>Experimental design goes like this—</p>
<p>research idea–>literature review–>research proposal–>proposal approval & funding (or start over with new idea and proposal)–> protocol design–> individual experiment design–>trial runs & baseline results collection → protocol/experimental design refinement—> more trial runs and baseline data collection (repeat as needed)–> data collection–> data anlysis–> review–> more data collection–> more analysis (repeat as needed)–> review–> manuscript draft–> review by co-authors–> finalized manuscript draft–> journal submission—> blind peer review–> manuscript acceptance OR manuscript revision ( with more data collection or data analysis) OR manuscript rejection (failure/termination OR revision of experimental protocol and redo experiment --re-enter do loop) → manuscript acceptance and pub lication.</p>
<p>I really wish I could draw a flowchart because science research is actually very messy with lots of dead ends and failures. It seldom runs as neatly and cleanly as you seem to think.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>BTW, I am quite familiar with PubMed–I work with it every day.</p>
<p>D2 works in a large research group (15 PIs and about 30-40 grad students and RAs) that publishes several times year, but their data streams go back for several years for baseline results. As I’m sure your groups’s does also.</p>
<p>Thank you for all your advice… I understand what all of you are saying it takes time and its not necessarily required but i want to be in the best standing when it comes to med school application the gpa and mcat are a given but i want to stand out.
Right now i have a gpa of a 3.75 starting ochem series 
I have an internship at the local hospital and i am shadowing the chief of family practice at a local medical school. One of my teachers thats involved in medical research is trying to get me a position at her company… but i feel every pre-med has these stats
I want to do meaningful research not just for med school but for me (if that makes sense)</p>
<p>Does anyone have any thoughts on the doctor that work for the medical board?</p>