 If you've been following me on this channel for a while, then you'll know that throughout my time at university, I've managed to do a decent amount of scientific research and I get quite a few questions from you guys about it in the comments down below as well. So in this video, I'm gonna talk to you about exactly the steps that I took to find a PI or a principal investigator and get some scientific research done that eventually led to a couple of publications. Let's get into it. What is up guys? Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. So for those of you watching that don't go to medical school where publishing is quite common or you just haven't thought about a publication, you might be wondering why do people want to get published at university? Now this can be for a couple of reasons, like wanting to learn more about a particular topic you're interested in, being able to contribute to the scientific literature, the fact that publishing can help your job applications in the future or just that everyone around you is doing it. I think it's important for you to understand what your reasons are for getting published to begin with because publishing something in medical school or in university takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of dedication. It's not something that you want to go into lightly. So think about the value that publishing is going to have before you even pursue it. Many students, including myself, get publications because we know that it's good for our CV and for future job applications and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just helps ease expectations and lets you know what it is you're getting into and why. If you do want to publish something then make sure it's in a field that you're interested in because trust me, you're going to spend a lot of time working on it. You can get publications with fairly little effort and that's something that I'll be talking about later on in the video so make sure you stay tuned for that. But definitely don't put pressure on yourself to publish and don't feel as though publishing is critical to your time at university or medical school. A lot of people think that publishing is a must when it comes to helping their career in the future and although there are definitely benefits to publishing there's plenty of other things that you can do to advance yourself and boost your CV to help you get jobs and make your application stronger, et cetera. But if publishing is important for your future job applications then just make sure that the journal that you're publishing in is indexed in PubMed and has a PubMed ID. Okay, so how do you actually publish something at university? Once you've decided what topic or field you want to publish in you're gonna need to find a PI or principal investigator or a mentor. Now helping find a PI is as simple as searching your university name, research and finding a list of clinicians and academics and professors who are carrying out research at your university. Once you've found that list you want to go through it and find out who's doing research in the field that you're interested in, who's accepting students for research and who's publishing regularly. You want to join a research project where the PI has a history of publishing frequently and publishing a lot because that increases your own chances of getting published in the near future. Now once you've decided on the ones that might be a good fit for you you need to start reaching out to them. Now there's a delicate balance here. You want to send an email that's personalized enough to the researchers that they know that you're interested in them and you want to work specifically with them but then on the other hand, you're a student and you've got plenty of other time commitments at university and so you don't have time to be writing out loads and loads of personalized cover letters and emails and trust me, you'll be very lucky if you get accepted on the first couple of emails you send out so generally you need to send out quite a few. So when you reach out to them send them a personal but friendly email expressing interest in their work specifically. It's going to go a long way if you make these emails a bit more personal as opposed to generalizing them and mass emailing it to just a bunch of people. If you can show passion for their work earlier on in the email then you'll probably have a better chance of them accepting you. Now not everyone is going to be able to help you and trust me, not everyone is going to be able to email you back. You'll send out plenty of emails and you'll never hear back from them but do reach out to as many people as you can to sort of cast your net wide and increase the chances of you being accepted for a research position and even if the people that you're emailing come back to you saying that they don't have availability for you or something along those lines. You know, make sure that you respond and you thank them for their time because you never know when they might have a position available in the future and they could reach out to you again. This can be easy to forget to do but keeping in touch with your academics and your professors, your clinicians at your university can be very helpful down the line just to emphasize this point of applying to as many places and people as you possibly can. I remember in my second year at the University of Toronto actually I was sending out these emails to apply for a position for scientific research. In the hopes of getting a publication and I sent over 60 emails, six zero and none of them ended up getting me a research position which absolutely sucked at the time because I put so much time and effort into personalizing each email. I had this template where paragraphs one and three were the same and then paragraph two was completely personalized to their own work, their own research, et cetera. And then in my third year of medical school at King's College London, I sent about 25 emails and I actually finally got accepted to a research position but I ended up turning it down because I got another research position in Canada and I went back to do my research there. It's another story. But all this to say, make sure you send out lots of emails because there's tons of students who are applying for these spots and you wanna stand out and you wanna increase your chances as much as possible. Also to say, don't be hard on yourself. I'm sure these people are very busy. They're getting tons of emails and if you don't manage to get a research position you can always try again next year. So now once you've found a mentor or a PI you need to work on the relationship between the two of you. It's great to start by sending up a quick initial meeting where you can chat about the research, what they're doing and how you can get involved. Now during this meeting it's important that you do two things. A is to learn more about your mentor's specific research interests and B is to see if you feel you could have a good working relationship with them. You're gonna be spending a fair amount of time with this mentor and their team so you wanna make sure that you choose one that you feel you can work well with. If you're working with a mentor on their current research project then I think it's important to be upfront about your goals and the outcomes for the work that you're doing. So consider talking about the potential for publication and the journals that you might want to be applying to. One of the benefits of having a mentor is that they're gonna be so much more experienced than you in the field of scientific research. And so don't be scared to lean on them for asking about the logistics of publishing, what your best chances are, if there's a realistic chance of you being published, et cetera. Because they might just say to you right off the bat, you know what, I'm working on a research project that's gonna take about five years to complete. I don't expect it to be published anytime soon. If your main priority is publishing then it might be better for you to go to a different PI. Now imagine knowing that information upfront versus not asking about publication and you start working for them and then you're halfway through the summer before you realize, well, this isn't gonna help me for my immediate job applications. I know it's a scary and daunting thing to do to actually talk about publishing, but remember, researchers know exactly why you're there. Almost every student who goes to do scientific research wants to get published and they're there to get published. There are a few who just love doing scientific research which is completely great, but they know this already. So be honest about your goals and ask them what the likelihood of publishing might be. And then even after your research project is over stay in touch with your mentors because once the research is done they'll likely be able to offer you future opportunities if they're gonna do more research and if not, they're just really valuable connections and friends to have in the scientific field. Something that I do is every now and again I'll drop an email to my PI or the team that I was working with just checking in with them, how are things going? How's that research project going? Just to keep in touch and keep things going along. Before we move on to the rest of the video it's time for an ad from today's sponsor Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. Their website builder makes it easy for someone like me with no knowledge of how to make a website to custom design one from scratch. 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Although finding a mentor and joining a group of other researchers is one of the main ways to publish it's not always easy and instead you might consider publishing something on your own. You can reach out to lower impact journals with your interesting ideas and tailor your work to their research guidelines. Often medical students can submit pitches for articles that they want to write in. Student specific journals like the Student BMJ are a good place to start. Also these articles that you write for student journals are probably gonna take a lot less time than if you were publishing in one of the big high impact major journals. Another thing that you might want to consider is checking in with your department see if they offer any summer research work. Often the work is paid and you can land yourself a publication off the back of it. The good thing about the summer ones is that they'll have a time limit on them so you'll only be working over the course of the summer and so if you make your intentions clear from the beginning and there's a high chance of publication you could secure yourself a publication within a short period of time. Again, be sure that whatever you're applying for you're at least a bit interested in or passionate for cause it's gonna take a long time. Now, one of the easiest and most common ways that university students can get published is by writing something called a letter to the editor. What you do is you find a journal that you're interested in and you search for an already published article that you feel you could give your opinion on or comment on or critique. Then you write an article to the authors of that article outlining your thoughts and then you ask the journal to publish it. This is by far one of the easiest ways to get published and it's a pretty common technique used by medical students here in the UK. Now, one of the best things about this method of publication is that you can get together with a group of let's say five friends. Each one of you writes their own letter to the editor and each one of you puts the names of the other four people on each paper. And so that way, if any one of the five of you gets published then all of you will have your name on a publication. Of course, throughout the writing and editing process you guys will all help each other out and contribute to each of the articles as well. But it's a great way to help increase the chances of getting your name on a published paper. The only thing I'd say here is again, if you're going down this route make sure that whatever journal you're planning to get published in attaches a PubMed ID to the letters to the editor that they publish. This is crucial because if it doesn't have a PubMed ID then a lot of places don't see it as a full formal publication. My personal experience has been a bit of a wild one with publishing. In my second year at the University of Toronto I submitted those 60 emails that I told you about before and unfortunately it didn't work out. So then in my second year of medical school I decided to reach out to a whole bunch of PIs both in the UK and Canada. And finally one accepted me in the UK which I turned down and one also accepted me in Canada which I ended up going to. And the research I was doing was on enclosing spondylitis in a wet lab using mice models. It was honestly such an incredible experience. I worked very, very hard for many months over two years and I learned a lot. I spent pretty much two entire summers start to finish both in my second year of medical school and my third year of medical school and all of that work resulted in exactly zero publications. This is a great example of when you start a research project you put in tons of work and tons of time and no publication comes out of it. So like I said before make sure you're interested in the topic that you're working on and ask about the publications and the likelihood of publishing early and upfront so that you can set your expectations accordingly. Then in my third year of medical school we did something called the Scholarly Project which is part of our course in medicine where you do a piece of research with one other medical student and you're supervised by some clinicians. Now after about an entire year of working on that project every single week we finally managed to get our work published which was such an incredible feeling. Honestly it felt so good to have all that hard work pay off and one of the biggest differences that I think helped lead to a publication this time was the mentors. They worked so closely with us and really pushed us to do everything right in order to get published. They helped us a lot. As this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning it's really important to find yourself a good mentor. Someone who really cares about you and cares about your future, getting published, helping you get there, et cetera. And then now in my final year of medical school I've managed to get a publication via the letter to the editor in a journal. So overall I've done quite a bit of research in multiple countries and I'm very happy to say and I'm very thankful that at least some of that work has been published. The last bit of advice that I'd like to give you on publishing in university is to persist unless you're really lucky. Publishing takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of dedication. Even after a lot of work papers can get rejected by journals and ultimately you might not get published. This is actually fairly common so it shouldn't put you off from doing research to begin with but it's important to keep in mind. Of course you and your mentors can do specific things in order to increase the chances of getting published so you can be quite selective with the journals that you apply to and you can tailor your research to the specific guidelines of those journals but it isn't always enough. If you don't get published the first time around you can always take the research that you've done and present it at a conference or apply to other journals, maybe some smaller impact journals and increase your likelihood of getting published. And at the end of the day even if you don't get published like myself after all that work that I did in Canada I honestly learned a lot. I had such a great time and it was just a completely new set of skills that I had never used or learned before so ultimately it was all a positive experience. So that is it guys, that is my best advice on how you can go ahead and get published in university. I hope this video has been helpful and can point you in the right direction. I have a good friend Kenji here at King's College London as well who has made a video about getting published in university. I'll leave a link to it somewhere up over here and in the description down below and that is it for me. I will catch you in the next one. Face. A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A.