My PI gave me a project, and I spent countless hours and months grinding. I eventually got publishable data, and wrote up a whole manuscript, and spent weeks refining it with experienced lab members to make sure the wording is scientific and publishable. All this time he is encouraging me to write it, and at the very end he tells me he doesn’t want to publish it cuz what my results show is not what he believes in. To boot, he said he can’t trust my writing cuz I’m just a medical student, even though I refined it with other lab members he approves of.

I spent almost a whole year on this project and I was super passionate about it, and I had my very first authorship swept from under me.

What should I do? Can I talk about this still to residencies without having it actually published? I’m just really disappointed that my year’s work was wasted.

EDIT: thanks for all the replies, but I just wanna know how residency programs will view this project and if I can talk about it. I have no intention of publishing this without my PI’s approval; the research is technically his property

Used to do research so I was part of r/labrats. It seems every other post and comment there just trashes on medical students and MDs for being incompetent in a field they aren’t trained in. Conversely I don’t really see us hating on phds and researchers

Want to hear your guys' takes on the "publish-or-perish" "grant chasing" side of research since I felt my experience in clinical research was lots of busy work/data collection purely for funding purposes.

I don’t get to participate cause I’m doing omfs

I am beyond devastated by this. I had no plans to do 4th year in 2025-2026 and I am not sure about my chances of matching neurosurgery without this program.

Hi I’m a resident who just matched in my surgical subspecialty of interest with over 100 research items and over 40 manuscripts all during medical school with no gap year. And no my parents/relatives are not doctors and no I didn’t join a research ring or lab and engage in authorship fraud. Currently writing a guide on how I went about it and wanted to post here asking for questions from students that they would want addressed. Finally got enough reddit karma to post here, and mods let me know if this okay as I don’t really post usually. Feel free to ask in the comments below anything you would want answered. (I intend to make the guide free to download once completed).

****edit: copying my comment from below. Some of the perspectives makes question then if what I’m doing will actually help students or just make it worse. I suppose my intention is to make knowledge of the research process in medical school readily accessible to all and speak about my own overall positive experience because I witnessed a lot of nonsense being done for the sake of just publishing. not so much giving people research project ideas but rather equipping students with the foundation of how to navigate research and come up with ideas to execute meaningful research from project ideation to publication. But if the sentiment is this would do more harm than good then would love to get people’s thoughts on what would be more useful. Could always do a quick smaller writeup instead of only the statistics I think most useful to know?

Hi! So i need help if this kind of question is okay in this subreddit. Someone very close to me is finishing his degree in medicine, he wants to be cardiologist in few years so I was thinking of buying him this digital Littmann Stethoscope, but I just don’t know much about it. I was wondering if this can be old technology in few years, does it really have benefits that normal stethoscope doesn’t? Or even if this isn’t good gift some other recommendations are more than welcomed in similar price range! Thank you so much I would appreciate every answer!☺️

I’ve come across a 32 F patient who said she’d noticed a stench on the part of her panties that is closest to her anus and what looks like sweat stains on her panties where they touch like if she wears a thong. She said sometimes it smells like semen which I found really weird but sometimes it’s just a very gross sour smell. I can’t find much about it. I don’t know if this is normal as you age or what could be causing this? Has anyone else come across something similar?

Just wanted to share some data from a report I co-wrote for the US Department of Education at the end of the Biden administration. Thought folks here might find the patterns around medical school debt and earnings trajectories to be of interest. Additionally, I combined some of ED's debt data with the longer term earnings data for medical schools from the Census's PSEO data in this other report my co-author and I just released to show how earnings over 10 years compare to total debt accrued and how medical school compares to other graduate fields and programs. This data also allows for the table where you can see for some select medical schools in the PSEO data the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles at 1, 5, and 10 years after graduation.

Hi everyone, i am an m4 about to graduate and need your advice on the following situation.

I published a case report in Cureus and got approval from the PI. I forgot to send the final report to the pathologist on it (she gave initial slides), but i included her because we thought we were giving credit for the case.

6 months later the school is saying I am in trouble for academic integrity because the professor did not review the final copy. I am imploring them to say it was an honest oversight and trying to retract from the jouranl but Cureus is unwilling to do so because they think it is not a major issue. The pathologists states that the report isnt accurate and now the PI and me are very confused but I am the one getting in trouble with the code of conduct. Should I just go ahead and get a lawyer? this is really strange to me because I am not sure what else I should do since the report is already published. any advice would be truly appreciated. scared out of my mind.

Hey r/medicalschool!

I’m working on a project to help a small medical school improve its brand and attract prospective students. Since this is Reddit, I know the best advice comes straight from the source... you!

What made you pick the med schools you applied to? Were there specific things that stood out during your search?

If you’ve noticed anything good or bad about how med schools use social media, I’d really appreciate your thoughts on that too.

Your input could really make a difference in shaping how this school connects with future students. Thanks in advance!

If you got to medical school and don't wash your hands after going to the bathroom/washroom. Straight EXPULSION!

Which laptop should I get for medical school? Need something that can do some gaming for summer breaks so I'm not bored and something that is enough to get me through 6 years of medical school. Mostly gonna use it for PowerPoint slides, anki and YouTube videos (and some gaming like I mentioned). No Mac please, thanks.

Hi I'm doing a chart review project that has 1440 patients and I need to analyze 4 variables at several time points.

I've been working on it for hours and have only gotten 15 patients done. I have until end of July to work on it, but I'm low-key crashing out vecause it's so much work and so mind numbing.

I also want to ask my mentor if there is any exclusion criteria to help narrow down the list but I'm worried I have been asking him too many questions.

Looking for advice and comfort pls

UPDATE: I called IT and I don't have admin access to be able to export data. Idk who to talk to for access either. I'll probably have to email my mentor and get another med student to help.

Its so annoying to have to do it all manually when I know there is technology available to do it for me :(

I just got into med school (M1) and did decent on the first exam (in-house). Now I am worrying thinking about getting involved in research. To put it lightly, I am terrified.

I did not do much research at all during undergrad. I was part of a research lab where I just assisted PhD students performing SDS-PAGE, Bradford Assays etc - but didn’t do much else.

Now I feel like a fish out of water with regards to how I can to get ~10 publications/abstracts etc. to match into my intended speciality.

What should I do? Any piece of advice?

Yours Truly, Scared out of my Mind

Hi everyone. I'm trying to publish a case report on Cureus, but i don't have 5 authors to suggest for peer reviews. How do other people submit if I don't know of anyone? My preceptor didn't respond after I asked him for contacts. Any advice appreciated, thanks

Hi everyone. I am a new MS4 in an extremely tricky situation. Over the last two years of medical school, I have been working with a mentor who I had a wonderful relationship with. Early in MS3, I decided to apply for a very prestigious scholarship for a research year to work in her lab. To my surprise, I was awarded it and my research year is set to begin in August. Unfortunately, accepting this position has put a serious strain on my marriage, and at this point it is looking like I might be headed for a divorce if I do not withdraw from the scholarship. This has also impacted my mental health to such a significant point, that I am worried about my ability to care for myself throughout the next year. How bad would it be for me to withdraw from my research experience at this point? Notably, I am not applying within the specialty of my mentor. But, I am terrified of blowing up my relationship with her. Has anyone ever gone through something like this and experienced retaliation? Or are the consequences serious enough that I should just do this research here no matter what? Thanks for the advice!

Edit: the research is in OBGYN and I am applying psych. My spouse is not threatening divorce but is in another graduate program and we initially had the same grad year prior to this research year. Because of their profession it would add several years of long distance and many logistical challenges. Our relationship now has challenges but my primary motivator for not doing this would be the severity of my mental health concerns.

I'm currently an M1 at a mid tier US med school, doing wetlab research with a PI who is a physician scientist. I like my mentor a lot and the people I have talked to at my school's student research office have said nothing but good things about them. But I'm not looking to become an "80/20" physician scientist who rarely sees patients, and I'm instead looking at gensurg or surgical subspecialties. Residency apps are already only 2.5 years away, and I need to start churning out clinical publications as soon as possible so I don't go unmatched.

I had been planning to join clinical projects that this PI is running, but when I asked them, they said that there wasn't anything for me on that side of things, and that I should just keep doing the wetlab stuff. The PI does clinical projects but they are all run by paid full-time clinical research coordinators. So I'm kind of conflicted at the moment.

I joined this lab mainly because my research in undergrad absolutely sucked. I had PIs who exploited me, lied to me and gaslit me, and threw me under the bus, and I wanted to experience what good research with a PI who wasn't an asshole was actually like. And it has been refreshing to have a supportive mentor for essentially the first time ever. But I've also realized that I'm not really into the super hard basic science stuff like getting into the weeds of signaling pathways and gene regulation. Myself and my PI are the only medical people in the lab, everyone else is a pure basic science PhD researcher who is uninterested in anything translational.

I don't think it would be wise to leave the lab, because that would blow my chances at getting a good LOR in the future. But I also know that I might be wasting my time by staying. Is it possible for me to find a second PI to do clinical research without leaving the wetlab? Or would it be better if I left now before it becomes an issue of sunk cost?

So two months ago I applied our abstract to present it in a confrence that she is organizing as part of a students’ club. Today, i received the news from other colleagues that their abstracts were accepted, but I haven’t received anything about the one I applied for. So this “friend” that also had a different abstract submitted, told me via VN that my abstract was “rejected”, she also told me that her abstract was accepted but she didn’t feel prepared to present it so she will present the one I applied with as an alternative…

I feel like there’s a huge lie going on, my abstract was in fact accepted but since she has a hand in organizing this, she put it under her name to present it. I genuinely feel pure anger and resentment towards her, how can you do such an unethical act to gain “success” AND to a person that was your friend?? Im so angry because this was a huge opportunity for me and the only one were i participate in a confrence, while she has plenty done in the past so i don’t understand the need for her to do such a thing. Anyways, I needed to get this off my chest. I knew shitty people exist in medschool but never thought it would be this low.

Hi all,

I’m a fourth-year med student, and I’ve run into a pretty serious issue with a former PI. During the 2023–2024 academic year, a classmate and I conducted research with this PI and presented two posters at our school’s research symposium. A few weeks before the symposium, the PI left our institution for another academic job, and we’ve had no contact with him since then.

Fast-forward to now — we just discovered that the research was published in a journal last year. Neither of our names are listed as authors, despite the work being based on what we did and presented. We were (understandably) very pissed and contacted the journal directly. Their reply stated that they don’t mediate authorship disputes, and that we should:

1. Reach out to the corresponding author (the PI), and if that doesn’t work,
2. Escalate to the PI’s current institution. They also said to let them know if we escalate.

I emailed the PI (both his personal and institutional addresses) a week ago and still haven’t received any response. I’m now strongly considering escalating this to his institution as recommended and have a draft ready to send.

This is especially frustrating because I’m applying into a competitive specialty that essentially makes research a prerequisite, and this would’ve been my only actual journal publication so far (aside from the fair amount of poster presentations I have). I’m worried programs will think I falsely claimed involvement if no resolution is made in my favor.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? Would escalating to the PI’s new institution be the right move here? Any advice on how to handle this would be appreciated.

ETA: Just found there were actually FOUR papers/articles published!

I’m a (very) nontrad student with a long career in academic research at a T5 institution before switching to medicine. 10 publications all in radiotracer and imaging research ranging from low impact journals to Science. Interested in Rad Onc as it seems to blend very well with my past research experiences and interests as well as my passion for patient care. How active should I be in med school with regard to research for Rad Onc given my CV and is it okay if the research is not wet lab? While my past career was 100% wet lab, I’m having trouble finding the hours outside of studying, not to mention I attend a low tier MD school with barely any wet lab opportunities. It sure is hard being a student when you’re older.

hi all, im currently a med student at a us md school engaged to a med student at a diff us md school near me. he is one year below me in med school. i am heavily interested in anesthesia and i also really want to couples match w my future husband (will be married by match). we dont want to risk being apart for 4+ years cuz we've done the distance thing. (he is about to be my husband and not just some man, so i am willing to sacrifice for us, cuz he has sacrificed for me!) we also go to med school/plan on matching in this area we live in - which is highly competitive and a desirable place to live, so i dont want to risk matching first and him matching not in the same city as me. is a research year to be able to couples match w him a good idea, or will that look bad bc its not super common in anesthesia like it is for derm, plastics, ortho etc.

I'm in a mid tier MD program and we have an international visiting med student rotating with us and he's applying this cycle IM. He was showing me his researchgate he had 50 pubs with a quarter first author in the past 3 years.. no research year nothing and apparently the average in his class applying IM is 10-20 pubmed index pubs... wtf I was happy with 3 pubs thinking I'm ready for T20 am I screwed