Medical Student Research

Scholarly Project

Are You a Patient?

SCHOLARLY PROJECT REQUIREMENTS

The following criteria must be met for student work to satisfy the Scholarly Project requirement:

  1. Students must document adequate work effort and sufficient contribution to any scholarly product to receive credit, even when working in groups.
  2. Scholarly projects must reflect adequate disciplinary rigor, i.e., there must be clear goals, adequate preparation, and evidence of the application of appropriate methods to ensure significant results.
  3. Results must be communicated effectively to the intended audiences in the broader community, particularly by presenting at the KSOM Medical Student Research Forum (each student must present their own poster).
  4. Projects must begin after matriculation at Keck and be conducted under the guidance of a Keck-faculty mentor.

  • Research teams often involve several students working on the same project. If more than one student wants to use the same study for their Scholarly Project requirement, they should produce their own abstracts that focus on different aspects of the study. While Medical Student Research Forum abstracts can have several students as authors, to get Scholarly Project credit each student must present their own poster (no group presentations).

  • Students should pursue their SP with a Keck faculty mentor. For work done with outside institutions, the student is responsible for finding a Keck faculty member who can vouch for their work, sign-off on their SP, and fill out the final evaluation of the student.

    Residents and fellows cannot be the primary SP mentor. It must be a faculty member (MD, PhD, etc) 

  • You do not need to do an entire project from scratch. That would be a huge lift and we don’t expect that. We expect most of you to jump on existing projects or start new projects that your mentors are planning and leading. It is difficult at this stage to develop your own research question and methods, so we expect almost everyone to rely heavily on your mentors for their expertise. 

    You don’t HAVE to do any one particular task (like data collection) but we hope that you can get a good sense for all the steps of the project. If you’re joining later and are more involved with analysis and writing, that is ok as long as you understand the original research question, hypothesis, and methods. If you are more involved at the front end and less involved in data analysis and writing, that is ok too.

  • No. We want our students to be integral team members that contribute across the research project, not just logging or abstracting data. We don’t want you to be taken advantage of just for data entry. While data entry is an important part of many research projects, and you should learn the skill, we also want to make sure you’re attending lab meetings to fully understand the research question, hypothesis, methods, and analysis. We would also want you to help with writing the manuscript if the project gets to that point.

  • You do not need to write a paper in its entirety. That would also be a huge ask. Even established researchers rely on their teams. Research is a team sport, so you are allowed to be a good team member and slot in any author position. It is not even a requirement that you have to publish a manuscript, though we hope that you do!

  • Presenting at conferences is a wonderful way to engage with the scientific community and grow as a researcher. We encourage you to present as often as you can. That being said, the only conference that fulfills the research requirement is the Medical Student Research Forum.