A holistic approach to remove the bottlenecks and to improve the quality of medical research in India

The current trend of conducting research and publishing the same to fulfill the academic or professional requirements can jeopardise what research actually means in health sciences. Rather than highlighting how many publications one can have, or showcase the expertise as a researcher, research can inform knowledge gaps and address the same in a replicable and scientific manner. More importantly, for low- and middle- income countries like India, research can be a powerful tool to assess healthcare problems at the primary care and develop innovative solutions to strengthen health systems at the grass root level. It can be argued that, enriching research portfolio for an individual is a misleading approach whereas research has much more to offer to the society at large. In the context of in primary care, academic and implementation research is important for several distinct reasons. The practice-based research can inform better practice through communicating the concerns or findings from research with key stakeholders of primary care. If the primary care practitioners are equipped with fundamental research skills, it may help them to become better critics and evidence-based practitioners. Publishing research findings in a good scientific journal is not an easy job. A lot of time and resources are often required from the submission process to publication. There are many obstacles for publishing a research, some are inherent some are man-made. In this article we describe our experiences about the bottlenecks that we have faced while conducting medical research and we have also prescribed some possible solutions which can help to the researchers in future while conducting medical research.