Your first paper as a resident
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Residency leaves little free time, yet it gives you what many researchers lack: a steady flow of real patients and a department full of experienced colleagues. This guide helps you pick a project you can finish, share the work fairly, and choose an article type that fits your time. Time-planning suggestions are practical advice, not rules from any organisation.
Finding a publishable question
- Start from your daily work: a patient group you see often, a procedure your department performs, a complication that surprised you, or a question you could not answer from the literature.
- Search PubMed before you start. Check whether the question has already been answered, and what is still unclear.
- Choose a question you can answer with data you can reach in months, not years. A well-reported small study is more useful than an ambitious one that never ends.
- Write the question in one sentence and show it to your supervisor before collecting data.
- Decide the study design and the reporting guideline that goes with it. The ICMJE names CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and STARD for diagnostic accuracy studies, and recommends the EQUATOR Network as a source for others.
- Find out early whether the study needs ethics committee approval; do not collect data first and ask later. Our guide to ethics approval explains the steps.
Time planning during residency
These steps are suggestions from common practice. Adjust them to your department.
- Break the project into small tasks with dates: protocol, approval, data collection, analysis, first draft, revision, submission.
- Fix a regular, short weekly slot (even an hour) rather than waiting for a free weekend.
- Write the methods section while you collect data, while details are fresh.
- Ask a biostatistician or an experienced colleague to look at the analysis plan before you start.
- Agree who writes which section, and set a date for comments from co-authors.
- Keep a single master file and give versions clear names so that nothing is lost.
Authorship and supervisors
The ICMJE criteria say an author must contribute substantially to the design, data or analysis; help draft or critically review the paper; approve the final version; and accept accountability for the work. Everyone who meets all four should be named, and everyone named should meet all four. People who only provide general supervision, funding, administrative support or language editing are acknowledged, not listed as authors, and the corresponding author should get their written permission.
WAME recommends deciding authorship and its order early in the research and discouraging honorary authorship. Have this conversation in the first month, not at submission. The ICMJE adds that the authors decide, editors do not settle disputes, and the institution investigates if they cannot agree. If an author is added or removed after submission, editors ask for a signed statement of agreement from everyone concerned.
If you used an AI writing tool, the ICMJE asks you to disclose it at submission and explain how it was used; AI tools cannot be authors because they cannot take responsibility for the work.
Choosing an article type
The ICMJE notes that original research normally follows IMRAD, while case reports, narrative reviews and editorials can be less structured. Reviews must describe how sources were found and selected, and for systematic reviews this is mandatory. A rough guide, which is advice and not a rule:
| If you have | Consider |
|---|---|
| One unusual patient and consent | A case report |
| A set of records from your department | A retrospective study, reported with STROBE |
| A focused question and time to search | A systematic review, reported with PRISMA |
| A comment on a published article | A letter to the editor |
Before you submit, read the journal's instructions for authors and check the journal with the Think. Check. Submit. checklist.