Our previous blog posts dealt with why you should do clinical research and a basic outline of how you can do research in medical school.
As medical students, we are often confused about choosing a research topic and deciding what we want to research about. This post will help you with that process – Choosing a research topic.
Choose a topic that aligns with your clinical interest.
If you have a special interest in any field and have questions related to that subject, that is where you should try to focus your research.
Don’t have a question in mind already? Don’t worry, find faculty who are involved with research and read up about their research interest and the papers they have published.
You never know what you may find interesting! If you still don’t find anything interesting but still want to have some exposure to research you can always ask a guide to give you a topic to work on.
Try to do clinical research (preferably not meta-analysis)
While all kinds of research have their own place in the medical field, as a medical student/ resident, you goal is to learn how to do good research.
A meta-analysis will not give you exposure to actually researching about the disease or condition you want to know more about. Even a simple in-depth research project has great learning potential.
Try to focus more on the research rather than just doing data collection.
There is a lot of hard work that goes into collecting data. While this is a key aspect to conducting any research, make sure you are not doing only the scut work.
Make sure you get exposure to researching other papers and writing the paper.
Retrospective v/s Prospective
As a medical student doing retrospective studies that involves reviewing already collected data makes more sense due to the limited time you may have at that institution.
A prospective study with a long follow up period may not be the best option for you. However, if you feel that you will be able to finish a long term study then there is absolutely no harm in pursuing that.
These were just some things that you should consider while choosing a research topic as a medical student.
If you have any more suggestions or questions, use the comments section below. You can also email us at theindianmedicalstudent@gmail.com.
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