How to Get Published

That sounds like my position a few years ago, to be honest. The first thing is to understand the motivation behind why you're looking to get published at all. Part of the thing in medicine particularly is that there are a lot of hoops to jump through, a lot of points to gather — whether it's for the Foundation Programme, the Academic Foundation Programme and beyond. So the first step is to really find an area you're genuinely interested in.

For me, when I started writing papers I knew I was interested in surgery — I was doing an intercalated BSc in surgery and anaesthesia, so it led in quite nicely. And what I did was find a supervisor within that space to help me write papers. As you said right at the start: no real connections, no massive talent in writing papers. That's exactly the position I was in a few years ago. I'd never written a paper before, I didn't know how to get published. But finding a supervisor in a space I was interested in really opened all those doors.

So find out what you're interested in, then reach out to people in that space who you admire. I'd recommend going onto some big journals or onto PubMed and reading some papers you find interesting. Look at the list of authors. Every author matters, but the two most important are the first-named author and the last-named author — particularly the last-named author, because that's the supervisor of the entire project. Then it's really the art of cold emailing: reaching out to those last-named authors, explaining who you are and saying you're interested in getting involved in research.

That's the first step. Hopefully, if you send out a bunch of emails to people you admire, they can help you move in the right direction and you'll gain that experience. That's probably my number one tip. Some people do it without supervisors — I have friends who've got 20, 30 publications independently — but that's a different approach.

Being concise is number one. As you said, these supervisors are getting hundreds of emails. If you've ever received an email from a professor, it's often two words long — "thanks, best wishes." So you get the idea: they have very limited time and aren't there to read 50 lines of a cold email.

Don't have a clickbaity subject line — that's a turn-off. Keep it simple, something like "research opportunities." State who you are: if you're a medical student, say so, say you have an interest in research, which medical school you go to. If you have any experience, mention that. Hopefully that's only three sentences-ish. Then say, "I'd really appreciate any input you may have. Best wishes," and leave it there.

But make it very personal. Don't say "Dear Sir" or "Dear Madam" — address whoever you're actually writing to. I think the problem with most cold emails is they're too long and not personal enough to the recipient. That's something I've learned, mainly within research but also other areas: how to cold email effectively.

Hopefully that email gives some indication of what projects they're working on. Often they'll say, "let's arrange a phone call," because it's a lot easier to discuss projects that way. The next step is to see how you can get involved. Usually they're not going to throw you onto a big primary research project that involves you being in the lab every single day — that's not realistic in terms of your time. So often they'll say, "we're writing this narrative review or systematic review on this topic, this is the basic structure."

They'll either ask you to produce a draft of the paper, or to write a specific section that's already been outlined. That's when you really need to learn on the job how to write a good paper, assuming you've never written one before. That's all I did. When I was writing my first review I had no idea. My supervisor gave me some guidance, but essentially I watched a lot of YouTube videos and read a lot of other reviews, and I learnt the best approach to writing concise papers that actually add something to the literature.

Don't downplay how useful the internet is. Ten, 20 years ago we didn't have this incredible resource. So reading other narrative reviews, watching YouTube videos, getting advice from your supervisor — that will fill in a lot of those gaps. You'll learn on the job, but keep getting input from your supervisor, and hopefully they'll be very open to that.

That's a very good question, and it'll vary based on the kind of paper you're writing. I've written a bunch of primary research, lab-based papers, and that's a slightly different skill set to a review paper.

If you're writing a review — say "the management of acute coronary syndrome, a 2020 update based on the literature" — then even if it's not a systematic review, you have to have some kind of inclusion/exclusion criteria, find a good number of well-written, high-yield papers within that timeframe, and take the key salient points. I normally ended up with 50 tabs open at the same time, which is not the best thing to do, but if you have a reasonable read of the recent literature you'll at least have a broad understanding of the topic. That's the first step.

Then I'd take the key salient points and write them in my own words, coming to unique conclusions based on the evidence I've just read. That's probably my biggest tip: a narrative review shouldn't just be copying and pasting bits from every single paper. Take the salient points from the recent literature and provide your own spin — novel considerations for the future, for example. That's really well received when writing a review.

You can churn out a reasonable narrative review within a few weeks. Whereas even a relatively small primary study — any lab work, any clinical input, speaking to patients, getting questionnaires, collecting and synthesising the data, writing it up, getting it published — is a significantly longer process. So it all goes back to my first point: what is your ultimate aim in starting to write papers?

If it's just to tick those boxes, narrative reviews are great. But if it's genuinely for academic interest and you've found a primary research area you care about, that's a better route, because you'll come up with unique novel findings rather than summarising the literature. It comes down to what your aim is and what point in your career you're at.

If you can get a New England Journal publication in three months, then you need to give me advice — I shouldn't be the one talking. But realistically, it depends on the type of paper. If it's your first publication and you don't have significant previous research experience, then aim for a reasonable journal with a reasonable impact factor. You can aim for NEJM, Nature, Lancet — aiming high is brilliant. But don't be disappointed if it ends up in a journal with a slightly lower impact factor, and bear in mind it can take six months up to a year to get published from the point you submit, because you have to go through revision processes. It's often a longer experience than you'd imagine. So if you're doing this for applications, don't start writing a paper one month before the deadline hoping it'll end up anywhere — it takes a while.

So I didn't start writing papers until essentially the end of third year, and medicine finished at the end of sixth year. Within that two-and-a-half-year period I managed to get around nine or ten papers, which gives some indication. What I found is that your output and productivity increase relatively exponentially in the initial period. Once you have some experience and you've proven to your supervisor that you can produce meaningful work, they'll give you more, and the time-to-productivity ratio improves significantly. So if you're in second or third year thinking of writing papers, that's brilliant — you'll hit that exponential curve early, and by the time you finish med school you'll hopefully have a decent number of papers.

But if you're nearer your applications — a few months before your Foundation Programme deadline — you're probably leaning more towards letters to the editor, because they're quicker to turn around. They're a lot shorter, often a page and a half, and can get published relatively quickly. There are caveats: for example, if you're applying to the Academic Foundation Programme in London, letters to the editor no longer count for that. But if you want a quick turnaround, letters to the editor and commentaries are quicker than a narrative review or primary research.

That's probably the most important point in all of this. It's all well and good finding a supervisor, but when I say prove yourself, it's really a couple of things — and sticking to deadlines is number one. Often supervisors won't give you black-and-white deadlines, but if they've given you a paper and you've produced absolutely nothing within a month, it's not going to look good. If they've given you a specific deadline, stick to it — ideally get your initial work to them significantly before.

Even if your research is fantastic, if they don't hear from you for a month, or you're two weeks behind, then even if you produce the best work possible — something that's going to revolutionise the field — your supervisor is probably going to lose a little bit of faith in you, particularly in that initial period. Once you've worked with them for a few years and have a few publications under your belt there's a bit of leeway, but sticking to deadlines is a hundred percent my biggest piece of advice.

If anyone hasn't heard of BiteMedicine, it's a company I co-founded during F1/F2 while working in London — I still am working in London. It's a medical education company. A close friend of mine in F1 and another close friend who's a medical student came together, and we realised that having gone through medical school, there were some big areas that were lacking.

The way medicine is really taught is that as it comes close to exams, you open up a website and do as many single-best-answer questions as you possibly can, read a few books, dump it all on an exam paper, chill for a few months over the summer, then repeat for five or six years. You end up on the ward with some knowledge, but it's often very disjointed because of how it's taught.

So we wanted to implement more of a case-based approach. We had this idea of a question bank with what we call multi-step SBAs — single best answers that take the user through an entire patient journey from presentation to diagnosis and management, asking a bunch of questions based on a specific case. Then a textbook based on the most up-to-date data, a concise summary of what you need for exams. And then link it to a video we produce based on all the guidance. So depending on which type of learner you are, you've got everything you need in one place.

We also wanted to do live events, so we started off holding a few in pretty dodgy hotels in London — pretty basic content, nothing too fancy — and got our first 50 to 100 students. That was around a year and a half ago. Now things have kind of blown out of proportion: we got a programmer and a designer involved, and built the whole platform we envisaged. We set up free webinars during quarantine, predominantly to help students across the globe receive medical education regardless of their financial status or geographical location. What was crazy is that when we started the webinars we had 50 sign-ups on the first day and were shouting from the rooftops. Now, three months in, we've taught over 15 to 20,000 students. It's a testament to the team's hard work. Very simple, humble beginnings — and we're just very grateful for how it's being received.

That's a great question. The main point is: how do you stand out in a saturated market? This is transferable — if you're thinking of starting a company as an entrepreneur, it's relevant whichever area you're going into. You're absolutely right, medical education is pretty saturated, particularly in the UK but also the US.

What we found is that as long as you're offering something that solves a problem, and something unique and relatable to students, that will have organic growth. A lot of the resources available in the UK are these big pie-in-the-sky organisations without any hands-on troops on the ground — without people setting up tutoring groups or mentorship in medical schools across the country, holding live events, alongside a unique approach to question banks, textbooks and videos all in one place. That's something we wished we had.

So it's a combination of solving the problem — you can't have all these really good resources on one platform — combined with the relevance and relatability our co-founders have, having gone through this process, and holding live events. We now have reps across every medical school in the country, so we're mentoring, face to face or online at the moment, over 500 students. It's that combination which is quite unique, and I think it solves a problem. As long as you provide something unique and solve a problem within a saturated market, you'll always stand out.

Songwriting is something I enjoyed way before medical school. My parents made me learn guitar at a very young age, and I taught myself piano during medical school. I learned guitar, taught myself to sing vaguely well, and when I was around 14 or 15 I was playing loads of Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed on my PS3. I was spending a lot of time doing that and thought, how can I use my guitar playing and my somewhat questionable singing to write music? I always liked writing poetry, so I put it all together.

I entered a few competitions and ended up being a semi-finalist in the UK Songwriting Contest, which is what opened the big doors. I made a bunch of contacts in the UK and the States, and I managed to write for some high-profile artists over in the States. That was good fun. Then the classic conversation came up with my parents when I hit 17 and started earning a little money: do you want to move to New York to be a full-time songwriter, or go to medical school? Songwriting is a pretty rogue career choice — people don't know much about it — so I made the logical decision and went to med school.

I kept writing during med school, did F1, F2, and I've taken this year out now to write more music. I lived in LA for around six months, written for some cool people and some interesting projects. I was a finalist in the UK Songwriting Contest four times this year, which was nice. It's just a creative release, to be honest — a very cathartic thing to do. After a long day at work I'll sit on my laptop, write a demo and send it off to agents and managers. I find it very relaxing.

It varies. When I'm abroad in LA, generally what happens is you're put into a session with a bunch of writers and producers you don't necessarily know. Record labels and publishers have a list of artists — John Legend, Charlie Puth, Bruno Mars, whoever — and there's a project with one of them coming out in the next few months, this is the vibe they're looking for. You sit in a room with people you don't know very well and have to express your deepest, darkest emotions to essentially strangers, and hope you produce something beautiful by the end of it. It's a pretty scary experience to start with, and it takes a lot of guts. So that's one approach — you write for a spec. The other option is you write with the artist in the room, which is really nice.

Now that I've moved back home to London because of all the COVID stuff, generally you get emailed. The last email I got was a list of 20 artists at Warner Brothers who need songs. They send you beats or backing tracks that the producers have made — to writers across the world — and the best one wins. You race to the finish line: you write the melody, write the lyrics, sing it, and send it back to your agent or whoever's representing the label. Six months or a year later you might get an email saying, "John Legend's heard the song you wrote to this guy's beat, and we'll offer you a publishing deal — we want it on the album, we want it as a single." That's really how it works.