How to publish a research paper as an undergraduate?
Depending on what your future plans are, publishing a research paper as an undergraduate student can make a huge difference. I managed to publish a couple of research papers as an undergraduate student and it helped me greatly in finding a training position and a research fellowship. In fact, the main reason for finding a training position as a medical doctor at a research University and for getting a postdoctoral research fellowship from the German government were my publications (so I was told).
In addition to making a difference in your CV, publishing a paper also helps you to acquire various useful skills, such as writing, preparing data for publication, addressing criticisms and learning about the whole publication process.
And finally, publishing a paper is amazing. Your hard work in the lab gets out there for everyone to read. And seeing your name and your paper in pubmed just feels incredible!
But then why are publications so highly valued and important. Isn’t it enough to have evidence of research experience in your CV in order to impress someone?
The thing is that you can say a lot of things in your CV, like listing all your research stints and the research skills that you have acquired. But how would anyone know whether you are good at doing research or mess up every single experiment, unless they work beside you in the lab and can observe you. If not, they would want to see the evidence. You could have good grades for your formal research attachments or a great reference letter, attesting to your research abilities. But a publication is still considered as the strongest evidence. If you have a publication, people would assume that you have enough ability to produce publishable research data, that you can work independently with focus and that you are able to complete something.
Another reason for why publications are importand is that any admission administrators and evaluators want to have criteria that are easily to screen for (and are ideally numeric). And a publication is much easier to score than a verbal assessment of someone’s research abilities.
Finally, in order to succeed in any competitive application process, you ideally need to have something that sets you apart from other applicants. And a publication is still a great way to achieve that and distinguish yourself from the crowd.
So how do you go about getting that paper. First of all, publication is not always publication. Let’s first discuss the different types of publication that you could aim for.
You could aim for co-authorship on a research publication. Co-author means not the first author (which is usually the researcher who does most of the work and drives the research) and also not the last author (which is usually the boss, aka Prof or PI = Principal Investigator). Pros of being a co-author are ‘It’s a paper!’ and you often don’t have to do that much (but this depends). Cons are that you are not the first author, meaning people will think that you just helped with the project, that you have no control over the submission process and that you probably miss out on helping to write the paper and get it ready for submission, which are valuable learning experiences.
On the other hand, you could aim for a first author research paper. This is obviously a lot more difficult, but it is a tremendous learning experience and is a great addition to your CV, no matter what the journal is.
Apart from these so-called peer reviewed research publications (“peer reviewed” because they are judged by scientist peers whether they are worthy of publication in terms of research question, novelty and quality of the research; and “research” because they contain primary research), there are also journals for which the bar in terms of research novelty and impact is not so high. One example is this journal (http://www.sibiol.org.sg/AYJB), where in fact in number of my previous lab and Cell Bio students have published articles. It is not comparable to a peer-reviewed publication in pubmed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/), but it is still a publication that you can list on your CV. But before you do this, ask your supervisor if he/she is agreeable!
Apart from research publications, there are also scientific review articles. To write these, you don’t need to do any research, but just read literature and use your brain a lot.
Fundamentally, there are two types of review articles. The first is a systematic review of the literature related to a specific topic. These systematic reviews are a lot of work to write, because you really need to read the literature related to the topic. Leaving out a major paper in the field would be a grave omission, which will upset the original authors and question your competence. Systematic review articles are not only difficult to write, they are also boring to read (at least that is my experience). Research is fun and interesting when it involves problems, questions, hypotheses and new ideas. It is not fun if you are just summarising what other people have discovered. Given that both writing and reading of systematic review articles is difficult and tedious, I always wonder why people still publish them (probaby because the Profs find some students who will write them for them…).
The second type of review article is a focussed review. Here one does not try to cover a whole research area, but only discusses a recent ground-breaking research paper (commentary), a specific hypothesis (hypothesis paper) or a specific scientific problem (critical review). Writing these types of articles has a lot of advantages. First, it is more creative and fun to write, and more fun and interesting to read as well. It is also a lot less work, as one only needs to read and discuss the few relevant papers without running the risk of omitting key references in the field. Although it is not easy to come up with new hypotheses or well-reasoned opinions about important scientific problems, it is always possible to comment on interesting new papers in your field of interest.
How then would you go about getting these different types of publications. For papers related to your actual research, you need to get your boss on your side. Generally speaking, it is not a bad idea to bring the issue of wanting to publish a research paper up when you first meet you supervisor to discuss the project. Of course, it is important to understand that there is no guarantee that a certain research project will lead to a publication. But there are projects that have a good chance of resulting in a publication and there are projects that are not publishable (at least not in the short term), because they are about generating some tool or are exploratory studies to obtain preliminary results for a grant proposal. Hence, it makes sense to reveal to your supervisor that you are interested in publishing a paper (and willing to work hard for it) and that you would like to know if the project has the potential to result in a publication.
Here is a very interesting article by a bold person who used this strategy as a student in order to get a publication.
Needless to say, the type of research project you do also determines the type of paper you might be able to publish. If you are helping a PhD student to complete his or her project, you can naturally only be a co-author. If you are doing your own project, you could potentially get a first author paper.
It would also be important at an early stage of your project (once you have become more familiar with the research topic and the technical aspects of your project), to discuss with your supervisor what it would take to publish the study. This discussion should be very concrete, so that you know what is necessary to complete before the any publication. It allows you to plan and prepare and can also serve as a motivation. And with a little bit luck, you will then be on your way to get your first publication. Except that even after submitting your paper for peer review to a journal, the manuscript is often returned with the request to perform additional experiments to back up your conclusion(s), before the paper can be published.
How about publishing a review article? There are a few potential ways. Firstly, talk to your boss. He may have been asked by some journal editor to write a review, and he might be happy to have someone helping. If not, he can possibly help you to publish your review in some journal. There are also small journals, like the above-mentioned Asian Youth Journal of Biology or scientific websites where you can submit your work. Or you can even have your own website, where you publish scientific news articles, which would be pretty impressive to anyone who is looking at your CV.
My first research paper, which was published while I was in my fourth year of Medical School.