Research for med students

[Naruto]

I'm a first year med student and I'm involved in some research that is likely to be published. However, I'm probably going to be 2nd/3rd authors on these projects. Should I be aiming for 1st authorship? 

By the time Carms comes around I think I'll have a couple of pubs but probably no 1st authors. Is this an issue for carms?

(Don't know for sure what specialty I'm going for but probably moderately competitive.)

[bearded frog]

All else considered, a first author publication is somewhat "better" than 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 8th author (except for last author but nobody is looking for that at this stage). It means you did most of the work/writing/coordination. Now really people just take what they can get and that's fine. Is it better to have 1 first author vs 2 not-first author papers, or any other variation? Difficult to say and probably situation dependent. The people you hear about with 5+ publications applying to CaRMS have their fingers in a lot of pies. Sometimes when doing graduate school or working in a lab, everyone gets added to everyone else's papers even when doing minimal contribution, and it gets the numbers up. Other people will just have 3 authors and that will be their only papers. There's politics involved too. I just published a case report as first author and the last author had no input whatsoever but was the staff "supervisor" and there was a 3rd author who had no involvement at all, but that's how these things work.

[zxcccxz]

Would agree with the above. It’s also important to consider other factors such as impact of the journal/paper. I would reckon a 1st author paper in some low-tier journal won’t exactly impress anybody but a 3rd author Nature paper would get you some second looks for sure. People understand that you could knock out 2 retrospective chart reviews if you really want to, it’s much harder to publish a basic science/translational project.

Other factors to consider include (1) is the paper published in the field your are applying to (2) how important is research to matching to your desired speciality? - there are certainly some moderately competitive specialities that care very little about research so they might just see it as having no publications vs some publications rather than using things like authorship or journal impact factor to distinguish between candidates.