In the concluding section of most research reports, there is a unanimous opinion that more research is needed, and indeed, more research is often needed. However, Douglas Altman
The scandal of poor medical research.
once suggested that “we need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons”. It is now widely accepted that there is a massive amount of avoidable waste in medical research because of inadequate research prioritisation, conceptualisation, design, execution, analysis, and reporting.
Avoidable waste in the production and reporting of research evidence.
- Glasziou P
- Altman DG
- Bossuyt P
- et al.
Reducing waste from incomplete or unusable reports of biomedical research.
These deficiencies reflect poor training in research design, which is almost an inevitable consequence of inadequate mentoring of students who are expected to do research as part of their education.
Encouraging undergraduate students to believe that an efficient way of learning about research is by doing it can result in frustration and wasted time, effort, and money; it might also encourage students to learn about one research technique only. However, inadequate resources for reliable advice and knowledgeable supervision mean that this approach is likely to produce low-quality research using flawed methods, which can use up most of a school's budget for research training.
Evidence-based skills help clinicians gain, assess, apply, and integrate new knowledge,
- Dawes M
- Summerskill W
- Glasziou P
- et al.
Sicily statement on evidence-based practice.
but only a few clinicians need the skills to actually do research. These principles led the medical school at the University of Queensland to reconsider how best to educate medical students about research.
The University of Queensland decided to switch the curriculum from requiring every student to do a research project to requiring them, instead, to critically appraise a topic, incorporating the following steps: (1) selecting a clinical question for investigation; (2) describing the searches used to identify relevant studies; (3) choosing the two best studies identified and justifying the selection of one of them; (4) appraising the validity of the study; and (5) summarising how the results of the study apply to the patients with the condition that had prompted the original clinical question. This change was successful because it made students more interested in research and it was much less resource-intensive.
8 years ago, one of us (IC) accepted an invitation to address medical students in the Gaza Strip. The talk began by asking students which they believed that clinicians should learn: how to do research or how to judge the quality and relevance of research. Most students felt that learning how to judge research is more beneficial.
The expectation that medical and other health-care professional students should do research needs to be abandoned: it is wasteful and sometimes harmful. The resulting liberation of teaching resources could be used to promote the skills needed to critically appraise reports of research, and therefore learn how to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy evidence. This redeployment of teaching resources is relevant everywhere, but needed most urgently in resource-poor settings like Palestine.
We declare no competing interests.
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