in favor of writing more, publishing less

from one hopeful physician to be to another

With massive incentives to publish in bulk to secure a “good” medical residency, it makes sense to continuously push out countless chart reviews, meta-analyses, case reports, etc. Nothing gets changed in the field, but it looks good! In the short term, that seems like all that matters. But so much wasted effort get poured into these projects in the name of checking a box.

Clinical question → data collection → stats analysis → abstract → manuscript

It’s very formulaic. But that’s not necessarily bad — it produces results. I luckily have turned out to be one of those students who enjoys research. However, too quickly my tap ran dry. I had too much data on my hands, and not enough motivation to write it all up. The intro, methods, results, and discussion workflow became boring, frankly, even if I was previously interested in the topic. I found myself forcing my fingers to type endlessly to finish a paper but it was uninspired.

It may look hypocritical that what you’re reading now is a result of my writing after I’ve just spent two paragraphs complaining about how my writing has gone stale. However, in giving myself the freedom to write outside of this formula, I’ve been having words flow out of me more easily.

Perhaps this blog/essay/rant/stream of consciousness is going out into the ether. Perhaps it’s shouting into a void. But, it’s freed up my creativity and helping me merge the worlds of arts and sciences (shoutout my liberal arts degree). This is how I believe it should be. I’m no creative writer… I’ve tried… and I’ve failed. But this freeform creative flow is how I’ve reignited this love of mine.

I love being the first person in the world to know the tiniest nugget of information through research. I love following questions and letting my curiosity take the lead. What I don’t love is forcing that into a box and making sure I can “optimize” every last drop of content and academic clout from it.

Research became a chore the moment I stopped letting myself think out loud. Writing without a methods section — without a hypothesis or a word count or a target journal — reminded me why I liked asking questions in the first place. If you’re burned out on manuscripts, maybe the problem isn’t the research. Maybe it’s that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to write something just because you wanted to.