Low medical student publishing rates: Lack or opportunity or initiative?

Dear Sir

As a medical student, I read with interest an article published in your journal titled “Publication practices of medical students at British medical schools: Experience, attitudes and barriers to publish” (Griffin and Hindocha 2011) partly because, this article gave senior medical students the opportunity to gauge the academic activity and output of people who they will compete with for jobs in the future.

I was, however, surprised that the main reason given by my fellow students for not having research experience was a lack of opportunity. Perhaps a revealing question would have been whether any of these students had been refused the chance to contribute to research after approaching researchers. This would differentiate between a genuine lack of opportunity and a lack of effort, which I feel may be a huge factor. Medical students have many encounters with clinicians and academics from a wide range of specialties, who in my experience are impressed with students who take the initiative to approach them for research opportunities. Many universities have formal research opportunities such as Student Selected Modules. Whilst I am aware from experience that it is not always possible to publish the output from these projects, there are many opportunities to present at national meetings and at the now numerous student conferences, some of which publish abstracts to Pubmed indexed journals. To further cast doubt on the credibility of students’ claim of not having enough opportunities, the UK Medical Students Association's website contains a facility where students looking for research opportunities or ideas are guided; it is not clear how many of the students sampled had made use of this fantastic facility.

Perhaps another variable to add to this study would have been the students’ particular career aspirations. This would have shown whether the students who have published were aiming for particular specialties. One would expect those aspiring for more competitive specialties to have been more academically active. I am convinced that a student who is interested in research will find countless opportunities to be involved in the many projects that are conducted in hospitals and universities; the driver is an individual student's motivation and initiative.

Nigel Tapiwa Mabvuure, Brighton and Sussex Medical School Office, The Audrey Emerton Building, Eastern Road, Brighton BN2 5BE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]