No- 79: Teaching Students How to Maximise the Impact of Their Academic Careers
Research Dissemination V Social Media Self Publicity
Tldr
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make any sound?
If you publish your paper today, one of millions every year, does it make an impact?
Do you want your work to be recognised? To help patients? To advance medicine? To help your career?
This post is a quick summary of the workshop I presented on how to improve the dissemination of your work, for medical students at the University of Birmingham in March 2024.
linktr.ee/jakemat91-for all of my work and articles
In Feb 2024, one of the medical students contacted all of the academic trainees in Birmingham and asked if anyone wanted to present a workshop for “medical students interested in research”. It was being hosted by the following MedSoc societies:
Birmingham Widening Access to Medical School Society
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/university/colleges/mds/outreach-widening-participation
Birmingham Academic Medicine Society - BAMsoc
https://www.linkedin.com/company/acms-birmingham/ - UoB Afro-Caribbean Medical Society
I love teaching, I live close enough to the medical school to enjoy the walk and I feel like I owe UoB Medical School for my great education, so I volunteered to help out.
I was invited to bring along some posters as examples of what can be submitted to conferences, join a panel Q+A and then present a workshop. The suggestions for topics was “something interesting and based on your career”.
Being given this sort of freedom to develop a talk for medical students is pretty rare and so I jumped at it. I decided that I was going to reflect on my “academic career” and try to advise the students on how to maximise the impact of their academic work.
A decade of extra-curricular academic activity (Medicurious)
How does someone people the best doctor in the world? (Medicurious)
Academic influence V Social Media influence (Medicurious)
I have been thinking about this subject for a while – as any long time readers of this blog will know. I could be wrong, but previously I presume that junior doctors concentrated on becoming “competent”. They then were recognised as “a good chap” and someone senior advised them or mentored them and they slowly climbed the greasy pole of medical politics, or academia etc.
In the current climate, job rotation is more frequent, shift pattern is more haphazard and there are fewer local meetings and societies for juniors to meet seniors. There is also a huge increase in academic output and it is easy to become a very small cog in the machine.
My hypothesis is that junior clinicians now need to work on becoming “competent” (or exceptional), conduct academic activity, set a career goal and then practice the very “un-British art” of self-publicity. This may sound crude but in the internet age, I believe that self-publicity is a skill that academics should learn in order to maximise their influence and research potential.
If you have done exceptional work that could make a huge difference to patients, but no one reads it, then have you really succeeded in your goal? The implementation and dissemination of research and quality improvement is a huge problem, and I believe improving self-publicity techniques may help.
So, these are my Top 10 Tips for Self-Publicity and Research Dissemination:
Know yourself
Know your goals
Join a team
Do something you enjoy
Do good work
Publish
Build your own
KISS (Keep it simple stupid)
Link it
Share it widely
You can find my presentation slides:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/bwams-talk-how-to-build-your-research-reputation/267032467
I know that I have not explained these tips in this piece, but I will come back to them.
My last thought for this post, is that I believe that I have probably worked too hard for where I currently am. I graduated in 2015 and only in 2023, did I get my first “academic” job. Prior to this, all of my academic work has been “extra-curricular”.
I have done this work because I enjoyed it, but also because I wanted to be “competitive” for my future career. However, I probably spent too much time, energy and stress on these projects and papers. I probably did too much.
And I would encourage every one in the cohorts behind me to think about the balance between work and life. I enjoyed the extra work I did but it has probably aged me. In the following unrolled Twitter (X) thread, I have tried to work out:
What is the average number of publications for doctors? What is the number needed to be successful? and how many is a “lot”?
My belief if that 1 paper is probably enough for most post-graduate speciality applications (except for super competitive ones). You don’t “need” a paper if you want to do GP training. A colleague has advised me that they think if you have 30 “good” papers, then that is enough to become a Professor.
My last piece of advice, is the same as point 5 above, do good work! If you work on something that makes a difference to patients, you disseminate it and you make an impact, then your career will hopefully look after itself. Good luck!
threadreaderapp - JakeMat91 - How many papers should a doctor publish?
