Is the Push for Med Student Research Predatory?

Medical students are conducting more research than ever before, but does this make them better doctors or improve the field of medicine?

Physicians have been debating these questions online after William Flanary, MD, an ophthalmologist better known as his alter ego “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” sparked the discourse when he argued on his podcast that medical school students shouldn’t be pressured to do research — and even joked that, in fact, it should be illegal.

He cited some figures from the most recent Charting Outcomes report from the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), which runs the Match. One person who matched to neurology had a whopping 108 publications, for example, though the average was 4.1. Dermatology and surgical specialties averaged more than 11 publications per matched applicant.

Flanary argued that the time would be better spent doing clinical medicine and learning how to be a doctor, emphasizing that medical students are not to blame, but rather the “predatory medical apparatus” is.

“It’s a predatory practice using med students’ anxiety against them,” he said. He described his own experience feeling compelled to do research to impress admissions and live up to an idealized picture of being a doctor.

Flanary then defended his “flaming hot take” in an Instagram video, further arguing that the research arms race is contributing to a “mountain of research slop.”

Many doctors have weighed in, and a lot agree with Flanary’s sentiments, though a few have pushed back.

Scott Fujimoto, DO, an interventional radiologist, posted on Instagram his own frustrating experiences not being interested in research as an applicant, and seeing a bias towards research as a program director working alongside research-heavy faculty.

“I could tell they downgraded a lot of applicants that didn’t have a lot of publications or a lot of research aptitude,” Fujimoto said. “Somewhere along the way we started confusing research productivity with being a good residency applicant.”

In an Instagram video, pediatric otolaryngology surgeon Abhita Reddy, MD, MBA, said that it’s great when medical students do research because they’re passionate about it and can identify markers of research quality and robustness.

“But it should not be the only way that we expect med students and trainees … to contribute to our medical field,” she said, noting that other avenues, like patient advocacy, communication, and policy work should also be valued.

In another Instagram video, Clay Moss, MD, a physical medicine and rehabilitation doctor, commented that “we are forcing medical students, who are already busting their ass, drinking from a firehose to learn all of these things about the human body and taking care of patients, and we’re turning them into lab rats trying to crank out a bunch of BS research studies.”

He added that residents are also pressured into the research enterprise, which he argued is a way for academic medical centers to get their name on more studies and become more renowned. Meanwhile, students and residents get more burnt out and spend more years not making money.

However, Julius Chapiro, MD, PhD, an interventional radiologist said the whole conversation sparked by Flanary was missing the point.

“[W]hen we give medical students the opportunity to do serious long-term research with us in true academic labs, we basically engage in a long-standing character interview and character building,” he wrote on X, encouraging students to focus on research quality over quantity.

In a video on his popular YouTube channel, Bryan Carmody, MD, MPH, of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, compared NRMP data spanning a decade, which showed that the average successful medical student 10 years ago had fewer research experiences than the least successful ones now.

Medical students aren’t conducting more research because they want careers as physician-scientists, but rather “because they want to distinguish themselves on residency applications,” Carmody told MedPage Today. He said this creates tradeoffs, like potentially distracting from clinical training, contributing to poor-quality research, and potentially even research fraud.

One 2022 study found that a quarter of PubMed articles with medical student authors are never cited by another paper. Carmody noted that while “citation count isn’t a perfect correlate of scientific quality … it goes to show that a significant chunk of these papers don’t seem to have much in them that later researchers find useful.”

Carmody has suggested that only allowing applicants to list a handful of research papers and presentations, shifting the focus to quality over quantity, could be one solution.

For the 2027 season, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which runs the Electronic Residency Application Service, changed the “publications” section to “scholarly work” and allows applicants to mark up to three entries as “most meaningful.” AAMC declined to comment on this story.

Alexandra Hajduk, PhD, MPH, a geriatric epidemiologist and research scientist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies medical students’ research intentions, told MedPage Today that research has played an increasingly influential role in residency admissions as other metrics that help applicants stand out, like standardized test scores, have been eliminated in lieu of pass/fail. She also worries that if medical students endeavor to author dozens of manuscripts, it impacts research quality.

“With all the competing obligations on students’ time, energy, and effort, it’s nearly impossible to fathom how students would be able to participate in the careful intellectual work of learning how to formulate important research questions, develop rigorous study designs to address the questions, carry out such studies, and thoughtfully interpret the research findings to impact clinical care or policy,” she said. “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

At the same time, Hajduk argued that research can help the development of all aspiring physicians who want “to practice evidence-based medicine and stay at the forefront of clinical innovation.”

“We just need to do better to make sure that the systems in place for residency are not perverting this critical objective,” she said.