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Objectives The medical field is facing a clinician-scientist shortage. Medical schools could foster the clinician-scientist workforce by offering students research opportunities. Most medical schools offer elective research programmes. Subsequently, a subset of doctors graduates without any research experience. Mandatory research projects may be more sufficient to develop clinician-scientist, but take more supervision and curricular time. There is limited insight in the scientific outcomes of mandatory research experiences. This study aims to examine publication rates of a mandatory research experience, identify factors associated with publication, and includes postgraduate research engagement.Design and setting Prospective follow-up study involving 10 cohorts of medical students’ mandatory research projects from Leiden University Medical Center.Participants All medical students who conducted their research project between 2008 and 2018 (n=2329) were included.Main outcome measure Publication rates were defined as peer-reviewed scientific publications, including research papers, reviews, and published meeting abstracts. Postgraduate research engagement was defined as research participation and dissemination of research at scientific conferences or in journals.Results In total, 644 (27.7%) of all mandatory research experiences resulted in publication, with students mainly as first (n=984, 42.5%) or second author (n=587, 25.3%) and above world average citation impact (mean normalised journal score 1.29, mean normalised citation score 1.23). Students who conducted their research in an academic centre (adjusted OR 2.82; 95% CI 2.10 to 3.77), extended their research (adjusted OR 1.73; 95% CI 1.35 to 2.20), were involved in an excellency track (adjusted OR 2.08; 95% CI 1.44 to 3.01), or conducted clinical (adjusted OR 2.08; 95% CI 1.15 to 3.74) or laboratory (adjusted OR 2.16; 95% CI 1.16 to 4.01) research published their research more often. Later as junior doctors, this group significantly more often disseminate their research results at scientific conferences (adjusted OR 1.89; 95% CI 1.11 to 3.23) or in journals (adjusted OR 1.98; 95% CI 1.14 to 3.43).Conclusions Our findings suggest that a significant subset of hands-on mandatory research projects with flexible learning pathways result in tangible research output with proper impact and that such successful experiences can be considered as diving board towards a research-oriented career.

The UK, like some other countries, carries out a periodic review of research quality in universities and the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) reported a doubling (103% increase) in its "world leading" or so-called "4*" research outputs in the areas of life sciences and medicine between 2008 and 2014. This is a remarkable improvement in six years and if validated internationally could have profound implications for health sciences.We compared the reported changes in 4* quality to bibliometric measures of quality for the 56,639 articles submitted to the RAE 2008 and the 50,044 articles submitted to the REF 2014 to Panel A, which assesses the life sciences, including medicine.UK research submitted to the RAE and REF was of better quality than worldwide research on average. While we found evidence for some increase in the quality of top UK research articles, a 10-25% increase in the top 10%ile papers, depending upon the metrics used, we could not find evidence to support a 103% increase in quality. Instead we found that as compared to the RAE, the REF results implied a lower citation %ile threshold for declaring a 4*.There is a wide discrepancy between bibliometric indices and peer-review panel judgements between the RAE 2008 and REF 2014. It is possible that the changes in the funding regime between 2008 and 2014 that significantly increased the financial premium for 4* articles may have influenced research quality evaluation. For the advancement of science and health, evaluation of research quality requires consistency and validity - the discrepancy noted here calls for a closer examination of mass peer-review methods like the REF.

Osteosarcoma is a primary malignant bone tumour, for which no improvement in survival rate has been made since the nineteen seventies. We set out to systemically identify the in vitro studies performed in the past two decades describing potential future therapies. Strikingly, we obtained a total of 5282 PubMed hits on this subject. The amount of publications has increased almost exponentially over the past few years. Studies from Chinese institutes are mainly responsible for this huge increase, accounting for 53% of the publications in 2015. Approximately 1/3 of all drugs described in the past three years could be classified as traditional medicine. Furthermore, it struck our attention that even though in such studies multiple cell lines are essential to represent the heterogeneity in patients, many studies were performed with only one or two cell lines, i.e. U-2 OS or MG-63. These cells are fast growing, facilitating rapid experimental application but also boosting drug responsiveness. This probably explains why so many in vitro studies have been published for this relatively rare disease. Furthermore, it illustrates the current publication pressure, especially in China.

In this article, we present the results of an analysis that describes the research centered on Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). The purpose of the analysis is to make a start of studying part of the field of quantitative science studies that relates to the most famous and classic bibliometric indicator around and to see what characteristics apply to the research on JIFs. In this article, we start with a general description of the research, from the perspective of the journals used, the fields in which research on JIFs appeared, and the countries that contributed to the research on JIF. Finally, the article presents a first attempt to describe the coherence of the field, which will form the basis for next steps in this line of research on JIFs.