An assessment of publishing practices and barriers faced by medical students to conduct research: A cross-sectional study from Pakistan.

ABSTRACT

Background: Pakistan being a low- and middle-income country, its institutes are substantially deficient in scientific and technological aspects and share limited research contributions to the world repositories. Therefore, there is a rising concern to reflect on the history and status of publishing attitudes among medical students in Pakistan and to highlight and address the barriers that they are facing. Methods: A study was conducted aiming to determine the experience, motivation, and attitude of medical students in regarding publishing practices throughout Pakistan in several medical colleges. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to find the independent predictors of students publishing a research article. Forward selection was used to arrive at the final stepwise logistic regression. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated. p < 0.05 was considered significant for all statistical tests. Results: From a sample size of 1225 participants, only 6.6% of students had published an article in our study. Of these, 59% were males and 31.3% were in final year. Males were more likely to publish articles than females (OR = 2.69, 95% CI 1.37-5.26) and final-year students were more likely to publish articles than first-year students (OR = 7.48, 95% CI 1.34-41.81). Students that had the knowledge that performing research is the way through which they will be judged for jobs had significantly higher odds of getting an article published (OR = 16.21, 95% CI 3.65-71.88). Additionally, students who had been taught how to write a paper and those who knew the process of submitting an article were more likely to get published than the others. Conclusion: Our study has successfully highlighted the status of publishing among medical students in Pakistan. Our findings serve as an eye opener and call to action for authorities to address the grievances of students in terms of barriers, lack of mentorship, and lack of research teaching. We hope our findings can guide a strong policy change to facilitate the next generation of passionate researchers.