To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever reported study that quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated the student-authored research publications from an undergraduate medical college in Saudi Arabia in particular, as well as from a developing country in general.
In several countries across the globe, research experience as a medical student has evolved as a mandatory component of the medical graduation requirements (Wickramasinghe et al. 2013). In fact, medical schools in Germany obligate their students to get engaged in full-time research projects prior to graduation and earning the title of “doctor”. In our college—as in the USA and UK institutes (Cursiefen and Altunbas 1998)—engagement in scholarly research activities, and most importantly publishing scientific reports is voluntary although highly encouraged and supported.
There is a directly proportional relationship between senior academic years and higher rate of engagement in undergraduate research activities (Khan et al. 2006). A multi-institutional Canadian study by Siemens et al. (2010) on the attitudes of medical students towards research showed that a greater number of senior fourth-year students were engaged in research compared to their junior second-year counterparts. This finding could be attributed to efficient cross-linking between clinical knowledge and research findings, better awareness of research significance, more attainment of research-specific skills over years, greater time allowance and exposure to research mentors by fourth-year students during their clerkship clinical years, which consequently permitted them to self-assuredly pursue research and publish scientific reports (Khan et al. 2006; Siemens et al. 2010). Likewise, similar results were yielded in our study where senior clerkship medical students had the highest number of publications (Fig. 3).
The trend of higher male participation in research compared to female students has been documented elsewhere in several studies (Burgoyne et al. 2010; Remes et al. 2000; Salgueira et al. 2012; Shahab et al. 2013). A study by Burgoyne et al. (2010) reports that male students feel significantly more confident about transferable and research-specific skills when contrasted to female students. Additionally, female students appear to be less interested in research and tend to prefer devoting more time to academia (curricular activities) than to research (extra-curricular activities) (Abu-Zaid and Alnajjar 2014; Abu-Zaid and Altinawi 2014; Salgueira et al. 2012). Logically, the more time and efforts spent in conducting scholarly research activities, the higher the probability to produce scientific publications (Abu-Zaid 2014). Moreover, we also believe that this gender-biased disparity concerning the number of student-authored publications by males and females may be because of the fact that Alfaisal University—College of Medicine began enrolling male students in Fall 2008 and female students in Fall 2011. Therefore, male students have had the advantage of three surplus years to produce publications.
Globally, the most common fields of medical student research publications (sequentially ordered) include: psychiatry, general medicine, medical education, oncology and community medicine (Wickramasinghe et al. 2013). In our study, the number of clinical science publications was roughly 2 times the number of basic science publications. A study by Druss and Marcus (2005) reports that there has been a movement from basic science to clinical science research over the course of the past two decades. Moreover, similar reports were also made in a different study, which underscored minimal (9 %) basic science research involvement compared to the increased affinity for clinical science related research such as retrospective chart reviews and case reports (Siemens et al. 2010). In our study, one plausible reason for the high number of publications in clinical science (particularly surgical oncology) could be related to the tertiary healthcare nature of the students’ clerkship training institute; the vast majority of patient cases are oncology-related referrals from the other local hospitals across the country.
Wickramasinghe et al. (2013) in their research article titled: “patterns and trends of medical student research”, review articles, cross-sectional studies and case reports were among the commonest types of student-authored publications listed under PubMed® and Scopus® search engines. Similar results were echoed in our study.
One of the strengths of this study is that to the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever report which attempted to descriptively analyze medical student-authored publications from Saudi Arabia, specifically, and developing countries, generally. Furthermore, our study intends to encourage other medical colleges in Saudi Arabia to follow our footsteps and present their analyses of student-authored research publications from their institutions. This will be very valuable in providing a more valid generalized picture on the status of student-authored publications in Saudi Arabia and to look for similarities and/or differences across institutes. Afterwards, barriers to scientific publishing can be better explored.
One major limitation of this study is that student-authored book chapters, and manuscripts currently under-review (submitted) or published in non-PubMed-indexed journals were not included in the study. This may have affected the overall analysis of all scientific outputs produced by the medical students at our College.