Blog Post Focus
This blog post explores collaborating with attendings for scholarly activity. Attendings can be great resources for getting access to interesting and unique patient cases, submitting material for textbooks, and every scholarly activity. Collaborating with an attending who is regularly involved in research can be the easiest way to increase your publication quantity and quality. I will start discussing my personal experience with scholarly activity as a resident and then give some thoughts on how to get involved with attendings.
Personal Experience—I Started Late with Scholarly Activity
I didn’t have any publishable scholarly works to my name until I was a PGY-2. I had given oral presentations on topics and had written up some cases, but no published works.
I had tried collaborating with attendings for cases before, but none seemed enthusiastic about including me. On the other hand, plenty of attendings told me how important scholarly activity was. So, as a PGY-2 I realized I needed to be more proactive. To get published scholarly works I took initiative on my own projects. I also reached out to several attendings and found ways to make myself useful.
In a relatively short amount of time I was part of several activities and was also able to get meaningful projects to add to my CV.
How to Collaborate With an Attending for Scholarly Activity
To collaborate with an attendings for scholarly works you must be proactive. You must identify potential projects.
Look For Ongoing Projects
The easiest way to do this is to ask attendings if they have projects you can be a part. If so, find ways to make yourself useful. If you are useful, then they will include you if they can. These can range from case reports to book chapter edits to podcasts and website design to helping them with courses. Any project is a chance to improve your knowledge and gain a skill set. Plus, you can add these to your CV.
Look For Attendings Regularly Involved in Scholarly Activity
The next easiest way is to find attendings who are regularly involved in scholarly works. They can help direct you to ongoing projects with others if they do not have any projects currently to include you on. Find attendings who put on courses and find a way to make yourself useful for these. Many physicians are industrious and you can find a way to make their lives easier and get included in meaningful projects.
Include Attendings in Your Scholarly Works
Another way to get included in scholarly work of attendings is to start your own scholarly work and ask them to be a part. If you set the ground work and identify what is required to get your work published then you have taken care of the most difficult aspects of most projects. Partnering with an attending who regularly does scholarly works projects then gives your work credibility and guidance for the remaining tasks. By taking care of the hardest parts you make it enticing for the attending to join your project.
Concluding Thoughts—Collaborate with Attendings To Improve and Increase Your Scholarly Works
Collaboration is the easiest way to get involved in a number of scholarly works. You can do projects on your own and get a fair number done. However, partnering with an attending can get you involved in projects you could never do on your own and improves the quality and credibility of your work.
Search out attendings to be parts of their projects and find ways to make yourself useful. You can also include attendings on your projects now and have them let you know when they have a new project to include you on.
You can get a lot more scholarly activity working with attendings than you can working alone.
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