Pressure to Publish in the Premedical Years

To the Editor: Many premedical students seek experience assisting with biomedical research. For some, a summer doing research is a way of bringing career plans into greater focus. For many students, however, their minds have been made up; they want to go to medical school, and they are keenly aware that doing research on a medical school campus can help them achieve that goal.

Letters of recommendation from academic physicians and biomedical researchers are valuable currency in the competitive pursuit of gaining admission to medical school. Moreover, for a few volunteers, research can lead to coauthorship on a journal article. After research grant money, publications carry more weight in academic medical centers than virtually any other marker of accomplishment. That message is broadcast so loudly that it now resonates on the undergraduate campus.

In an era of $300 per hour SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) tutors,¹ the aggressive pursuit of impressing admissions committees comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, I recently received a curriculum vitae (CV) that seemed to set a new standard for prolific achievement in biomedical research by a young adult. This 20-year-old college student had 11 publications listed on his CV, most of which addressed the surgical management of a type of cancer. Some were published when the author was 16 years old.

Ten of the 11 articles included another author, usually the senior author, with the same last name. That a well-connected family member engaged in medical research might want to help a young student strengthen his or her CV, irrespective of the student's actual contribution to the research, is understandable although lamentable. That a medical school admission committee might actually be impressed by such distortion is troubling.

The pressure to "publish or perish" in higher education pushes faculty to generate new knowledge. This pressure should not, however, be visited on college students who have not even completed basic premedical course work. For the undergraduate who ultimately attends medical school, there will be plenty of time to publish research if doing so becomes a genuine career interest. Most physicians, however, ultimately pursue a career in taking care of patients.

The message to premedical students from medical schools should be clear and consistent: participating in biomedical research for the sake of impressing admission committees is probably a mistake. Rather, demonstrating passion, commitment, and integrity in academics and extracurricular pursuits is impressive and will be rewarded.