how do residents crank research?

[Guest]

Did a sub-I at UCSF and those guys get absolutely crushed into the ground, clinically. They're also just cranking out papers - how do people do that? Jacob Young out there with like 100 papers and every award known to man. Am I just dumb? Yeah perhaps..

[Guest]

The highly productive residents do work extremely hard even on their free time to get the papers out.

There are departments have opportunities and invest in infrastructure that makes it easier. As in, review/paper invitations, statisticians, strong retrospective databases, and strong cadre of medical students or preclinical fellows to assist with the time-consuming tasks. And then, the more you publish, the easier it becomes to publish.

[Guest]

Learning basic stats helps, you lose a lot of time waiting for a statistician every time you want to know if something is significant. You don’t need to know much, most retrospective studies just require multivariate logistic regression on top of basic comparative statistics. Keeping an organized and accurate data set that you can then mine for different projects is also helpful.

[Guest]

I wonder when people in this field will realize that "more is just more". Better to have a handful of papers that people want to actually read and think about. Or not. If you ever want to get a grant then this actually backfires on you significantly. The NIH does not give points for >100 low-impact papers when you get around to submitting a K-award. They actually detract for it.

Individuals like this do not exist in a vacuum - there is an entire community of people helping and placing people on papers.

[Guest]

^^This idiot has no clue.

Most of the residents just have med students do the actual work, the resident just reviews the paper and provides the database. It seems like everyone benefits: The med students learn something, the resident gets a publication and probably learns something too, and the department looks good/productive, especially if you have fundraisers.

Maybe also something new can be discovered; its always a net positive, if only for the learning experience.

[Guest]

Yeah, I'm an idiot. Cool take. Let's look at Jacob Young. His highest cited paper, "Management of glioblastoma in elderly patients", does not even show up on Altmetric and about half the citations are self-cites by people on the paper. Yeah - made an impact. His second most cited paper, "The Impact of Traumatic Brain Injury on the Aging Brain", has 2.5k accesses an Altimetric of 1. No one ANYWHERE cared about that paper. This is not about this one person. It's about the focus on getting out a paper based on a database you did not collect to say something about resecting the FLAIR changes in LGGs. Did we need 30 papers on that? Does anyone give a damn about the 31st? No. They do not. Keep telling yourself it's important. Tell me how that works out for you.

The assertion, "its [sic] always a net positive" in a world engaging with a replication crisis and an ever-increasing number of bullshit papers is just wrong. I'm glad that someone learned about scholarship and writing something, but pretending like it was anything more than primitive ChatGPT-style plagiarism is hilarious. Half these papers just regurgitate all the previous "knowledge", that is NOT learning.

I know that when you're a medical student or resident trying to get to the next phase pushing out a bunch of papers seems like the only thing you have control over. That means you will obsess over it. You will overreact when someone challenges that worldview. You might even call them an idiot.

[Guest]

I would say that ~20 neurosurgery clinical papers = 1 Nature paper.
So by that calculation, Dr. Young has published a PhD-equivalent amount of 20 Nature papers, which is amazing.

[Guest]

20:1 is not accurate. Sit Eddie Chang down and ask him if he’d rather have 20 clinical papers or 1 first author Nature paper and see what he says. Your NIH bio sketch let’s you list three papers for each “research contribution”. Clinical papers will get you nowhere by that metric.

Ask yourself, if I had to point to one, single paper that defined my contribution during medical school and residency - what would it be? Many people will say that no one has a meaningful response to that or they’ll just offer up some middle author nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that those people are not out there and they don’t give a damn about getting 100 low rent clinical citations.

[Guest]

Would neurosurgery residency care if a high-impact paper is irrelevant to neurosurgery? Like a Nature paper on synthetic chemistry.

[Guest]

One thing people never realize... you can have 100+ papers, most of which will be low tier clinical journals, AND you can have a few bigger basic science papers. The notion that the NIH punishes you for having clinical papers is a huge misconception (or intentionally inflammatory?). I have been through that process, and its just not true. Yes it is very helpful to have a handful of relevant basic/translation papers similar to your K08/23 aims. No, the reviewers will not penalize you if you also have 100 other papers that are not the same focus.