how do you publish in time for applications?!

[dreamer87]

hi everyone

 

i'm wondering how people are able to publish their results in time for med school applications - i spoke with a PI a few weeks ago and she wants me to complete some grad school courses before i start collecting data, because the type of research i will be doing will be statistics heavy. she speculated that i would only be ready for data collection after i finished my classes in the winter, so basically, sept-march i'd be taking classes, then do my data collection etc in a few months and defend + publish to finish up by the following april-may.

 

i'm wondering if it's even possible for me to publish something in time for my applications to med in this case - so my question is: did you guys publish within the first year of your masters, or was your paper in the process of being published when you applied/when you WILL be applying.

 

do med schools look at you as having a publication if it has been submitted, or does it only have weight once it is actually published?

 

i'd appreciate any help, thank you!

[A-Stark]

The time from article submission through revisions and final acceptance can be quite long - and even longer for actual publication. That being said, you can put accepted but still unpublished articles on your CV. I don't think "submitted" counts for much of anything.

[Noodle]

Hello!

 

Be warned that it takes a LONG time to publish. I finished my Masters 3 months ago and I only JUST submitted my papers to journals. And then when I get them back (it takes ~4-8weeks to get it peer reviewed), it's likely that I will have to make corrections (~2 weeks to fix or more, and this all depends on whether the paper was accepted. A lot more time is needed if the paper was rejected with encouraged resubmission). Then you get the proofs awhile later (maybe two weeks later if the reviewers/editor feels like you've satisfied their concerns). And then your paper may go "In Press"....which is essentially good as published, only that your work hasn't been published yet.

 

After doing my honours project in undergrad it took me ~ 2 years to get the paper published (just cause it was my first one and I didn't know what I was doing).

 

I would say it is likely that you won't be able to publish anything until you've got some data, and then even after that it takes a long time. If you really want to try publishing something....see if you can take a reading course, and then publish a review paper from that research.

 

Good luck!

[dreamer87]

The time from article submission through revisions and final acceptance can be quite long - and even longer for actual publication. That being said, you can put accepted but still unpublished articles on your CV. I don't think "submitted" counts for much of anything.

 

thanks for the reply! i think i used the wrong word - what i was trying to say was, if the paper is accepted, but not actually published, is that just as good, and i guess you are saying it is, so that's good. but please read the end of my post, i have a question for you and Noodle both

 

Hello!

 

Be warned that it takes a LONG time to publish. I finished my Masters 3 months ago and I only JUST submitted my papers to journals. And then when I get them back (it takes ~4-8weeks to get it peer reviewed), it's likely that I will have to make corrections (~2 weeks to fix or more, and this all depends on whether the paper was accepted. A lot more time is needed if the paper was rejected with encouraged resubmission). Then you get the proofs awhile later (maybe two weeks later if the reviewers/editor feels like you've satisfied their concerns). And then your paper may go "In Press"....which is essentially good as published, only that your work hasn't been published yet.

 

After doing my honours project in undergrad it took me ~ 2 years to get the paper published (just cause it was my first one and I didn't know what I was doing).

 

I would say it is likely that you won't be able to publish anything until you've got some data, and then even after that it takes a long time. If you really want to try publishing something....see if you can take a reading course, and then publish a review paper from that research.

 

Good luck!

 

thanks for the reply! i didn't realize it takes THIS long to pubslish because i see acceptance/rejections/invites for all these grad students and it says, one 1st author, one 2nd author publication + ECs etc, and now i was wondering how they are able to put that on their applications - doesn't that mean that essentially within the first few months you need to find something publishable and get working on it to get it in for review + acceptance by the time you are applying to med in the second year of your masters? cause that's crazy.

 

i think the review article is a great idea, but would they let a masters student do that? i was under the impression that only PIs did that sort of thing?

 

 

now a question for both of you - when you guys say it takes this long to publish papers, are you referring to bench type research, for example on mice/flies etc, or clinical research? because i know that clinical research papers are typically a LOT shorter, so hence wouldn't it take less time for writing + review + acceptance + publication?

 

Noodle, what type of research did you do? was it clinical?

[Noodle]

Hi again!

 

My masters papers were in an ecology-related field. My undergrad was in an evolutionary biology field....I didn't actually collect my own data though....I just analyzed it, which took a long time.

 

Just because clinical papers are shorter, doesn't mean that they are faster to put together. I mean, if you look at some Nature or Science papers, they are super short....and you'd have to have an amazing well-thought out project to get into those journals.

 

Any researcher can attempt to write a Review paper, and they may succeed depending on how well researched their topic is. And writing a review paper takes a lot of time too.

 

If you wanted to be able to put down that you have a published paper by December, you'd have to be working on that research now, I think. Maybe you could be helpful to someone in a lab and then *maybe* you could be put down as a 2nd+ author... if you are super keen to get a publication out, that would be your best bet, rather than publishing your own research.

 

Hopefully this helps!

[leap87]

now a question for both of you - when you guys say it takes this long to publish papers, are you referring to bench type research, for example on mice/flies etc, or clinical research? because i know that clinical research papers are typically a LOT shorter, so hence wouldn't it take less time for writing + review + acceptance + publication?

 

 

Trust me, it takes a long time to finish up your clinical research (unless it's a pilot study). Depending on what you're studying and how much funding you have, recruitment of people is the most tedious and annoying thing from this research. It took me about 3 months to figure out what my project is and what it's supposed to look like, write a literature review and informed consent/ethics proposal, get ethics approved, write up the intro and methods. Then it took me another 3 months to recruit and collect all of the data (for some grad students in my lab it takes way longer than that - months) - my project was trial and error because no one has ever done it before so it was taking a lot of time but a lot of people are also hesitant on doing research (unless you pay them) - especially the clinical populations.

 

Once you're done that, let's say you have like 20 controls and 20 patients, it takes a whole lot of time to analyze all of the data and make sense out of it. Your PI is right - having a solid statistical background and knowledge of programs such as MATLAB and shortcuts in Excel can shorten the length of time you spend on analysis but it is still tedious and long. Then you have to write up your results, make up graphs and/or tables etc. supporting your argument and have to write up a discussion. Discussion usually doesn't take that long.

 

It is easy to make up a poster - the first one took me about a week but the second one was done in 3 days. Posters need to look professional and putting all of the info on a poster is quite annoying - because you have a lot of results so you have to cut stuff out or figure out a way to represent it nicely. Once you get to a conference, poster presentation is easy but actual presentation on the podium takes time to perfect. Making presentations = tedious but nonetheless fun. So go to conferences and make posters (even if you just have preliminary data).

 

For publication you need to have some very good results, have made some sort of breakthrough etc. You don't want your paper published in some unknown journal that no one will ever read (or you do?), so aim for the top. After you submit your paper for publication, it takes time to be reviewed and then a decision is made.

 

So, I would say, aim for a publication but be creative in your study design. Do something others haven't done = much easier to publish if you have decent results.

 

This is just my 0.02 cents.

 

I had 2 poster presentations and 2 oral conference presentations. I'm in the process of doing another poster/oral in June and then upcoming year 2 more. And I'm only in my undergrad (last year). I'm publishing the study I'm working on right now.

 

Hope that helped a bit!

[Starling]

i think the review article is a great idea, but would they let a masters student do that? i was under the impression that only PIs did that sort of thing?

 

Masters students can write reviews. I did. They can be quite time consuming though!

 

Also, I agree with what others have said that you can list a publication in your application once it has been accepted (i.e. doesn't have to actually be published yet).

[NewfieMike]

it is VERY VERY VERY variable in the kind of time it takes to publish, clinical or non-clinical.

 

For example:

 

 

in basic science, you can do an experiment that lasts 2 weeks. You can also do an experiment that takes 6 months.

 

In clinical, you can have the above problems of recruitment like Leap87 said, OR you are involved in research where you do not recruit at all. I know a professor at my university who used to work for stats canada, and has this enormous collection of data from 10,000 different scenarios. All he does is just run some correlations until he finds something significant, and bam! publishes.

 

If someone tells you that they've published like VERY VERY early in their academic career, they either:

 

-hopped in on a project last minute

-belong to a lab where everyone gets on the paper, no matter what

-did some bull**** correlation paper as described above

 

and in the rare instance

 

-actually worked their asses off to complete and publish a meaningful study.

 

keep in mind that last one is the exception.

[dreamer87]

it is VERY VERY VERY variable in the kind of time it takes to publish, clinical or non-clinical.

 

For example:

 

 

in basic science, you can do an experiment that lasts 2 weeks. You can also do an experiment that takes 6 months.

 

In clinical, you can have the above problems of recruitment like Leap87 said, OR you are involved in research where you do not recruit at all. I know a professor at my university who used to work for stats canada, and has this enormous collection of data from 10,000 different scenarios. All he does is just run some correlations until he finds something significant, and bam! publishes.

 

If someone tells you that they've published like VERY VERY early in their academic career, they either:

 

-hopped in on a project last minute

-belong to a lab where everyone gets on the paper, no matter what

-did some bull**** correlation paper as described above

 

and in the rare instance

 

-actually worked their asses off to complete and publish a meaningful study.

 

keep in mind that last one is the exception.

 

regarding the bolded part - is this type of research considered not-all-that-respectful? the type of research i'm going into is statistics based - but it's province level type statistical data, which is concentrated on health reform/health policies - studies my PI and his unit complete are used by the province to make changes to healthcare policies etc.

 

i don't know now - i thought this type of research was quite meaningful because after all, how else do we know what the state of our healthcare system is unless we research it and use many different statistical models to analyze records of patients over 10-20 years to see whether or not or current policies are good and what improvements can be made? when something new is introduced to save lives of Canadians there was someone who did research to discover that a problem existed in the first place.

 

but after reading your post i'm wondering if there are others like you who think this type of research is just correlational and not that good.

 

but thanks for the replies everyone!

[NewfieMike]

i never meant to imply that this sort of research isn't meaningful, I just think it's in a completely different category from other sciences (like basic science) and they shouldn't be compared in terms of "ease in publishing".

 

Like if you have a massive database of data, you can essentially do as many stats as you want and publish a bunch of papers from the one database.

 

In contrast, in some types of research you only use the data once. Then you go find more for a second study, etc.

 

So no, I don't think this sort of research is "not-at-all respectful" or anything like that. Just when someone tells me they've published something really early into their academic career, I'm not surprised when I find out it is of that nature.