Medical Research

A little blurb about medical research: Is it me or is research like real life where the rich gets richer? I have been doing a lot of writing/scut work for other people to get my publication record up but if there is one thing I’ve learned, it that a lot of people get on my papers without doing anything. This is fine for the PI who funds the projects but when the only contribution is editing the manuscript, I’m not sure it deserves so much credit. It’s interesting because this is how research goes. You start at the bottom where you will do almost anything to get on a paper (aka me). You do 90% of the work until you are senior enough to run the studies (aka residents/PI/doctors), and then you have the privilege of accruing more papers at minimal cost because you have underlings to do 90% for you (aka other people like me). Thus, it’s sweet when you actually get to that level but getting there is hard/time-consuming and sometimes impossible (much like moving from lower class to upper class).

I guess I should be grateful though because there are probably a dozen med students wanting to do exactly what I am doing which is lots of writing, data analysis, and random scut but some days, I feel that this who system is corrupt.