The Boom in Politicized Medical Student "Research"

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DO NO HARM

The Boom in Low-Impact, Politicized Medical Student Research
by Jay P. Greene, Director
July 14, 2026

THE RISE IN PUBLICATIONS AUTHORED BY MEDICAL STUDENTS
To track the number of publications involving medical students as authors, we conducted searches of PubMed, which is affiliated with the National Institute for Health. According to its own description, “PubMed contains more than 40 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature” and has been “available to the public online since 1996.”
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Using this method, we find that medical student–authored research was uncommon 25 years ago. (See Figure 1.) Between 2000 and 2006, no year had more than 17 publications with a student author. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of studies written by medical students per year fluctuated between 17 and 58. In 2013, student authorship rose to 135 publications and jumped again in 2014 to 411. By 2022, that number rose to 932 before slipping back to 735 in 2025. That recent decline may be distorted by the fact that PubMed is sometimes delayed in receiving and listing publications, sometimes by several years.
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THE PREVALENCE OF WOKE RESEARCH
Medical student–authored publications do not only differ from other research in their rate of increase, but those studies also differ in how focused they are on woke topics. To gauge this kind of politicized research, we identified publications authored by medical students that contained at least one of the following woke terms in their title or abstract: “equity,” “disparities,” “social,” “justice,” “race,” “racist,” “racism,” “diversity,” or “inclusion.” We applied these same search criteria to all publications in PubMed for comparison.
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THE CHALLENGE OF PRODUCING QUALITY RESEARCH
Despite disproportionately and increasingly being devoted to woke topics, medical-student publications might arguably be rising in quality. For example, a recent analysis concluded, “Our study demonstrates that medical student research has undergone dramatic growth in both volume and quality between 2003 and 2023.” A different study, however, found that the rise in student-authored articles was marked by a significant decline in quality: “There was a relative increase in perspective papers and a decrease in case reports. Approximately one in four medical student papers were never cited, and approximately one in six were published in a journal with a publication fee.”
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EXAMPLES OF LOW-QUALITY AND POLITICIZED RESEARCH
The evidence is abundantly clear that the rising volume of articles authored by medical students is both of low quality and relatively focused on politicized topics. A few examples of this kind of work by medical students help illustrate how serious this issue is:

“REFORMING MEDICAL CURRICULA TO SUPPORT INDIGENOUS STUDENTS AND REDUCE HEALTHCARE DISPARITIES,” Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development (2025).

“ADDRESSING HEALTH INEQUITIES IN THE UNITED STATES: A CASE REPORT ON AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER (ASD) AND SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH,” Cureus (2023).

“FILLING THE GAP: CREATING A STUDENT-RUN LGBT+ CLINIC TO ADDRESS HEALTH DISPARITIES,” Academic Medicine (2022)

CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS
Many experts who have examined the issue of rising medical-student publication attribute the increase to changing the reporting of results for the Step 1 exam (a test that measures medical-student knowledge of pre-clinical course material) to pass/fail.

As Elliott and Carmody note:
At competitive residency programs, program directors increasingly use research productivity to discriminate among applicants. In the National Resident Matching Program’s most recent survey, program directors rated involvement and interest in research as being as important as membership in Alpha Omega Alpha or the Gold Humanism Honor Society when deciding whom to interview or rank, and 41% of program directors in a different national survey reported that research participation will become more important after the transition to pass/fail scoring for Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

The most important solution to reverse this “arms race” in medical-student publication is to reverse its initial cause — the shift to pass/fail grading. When students can meaningfully differentiate themselves through strong performance in coursework and on standardized examinations, they will have less incentive to chase numerous low-value publications, allowing them instead to devote their efforts towards building a strong scientific and clinical foundation that will ultimately benefit their future patients. Recent legislation in Louisiana requires public medical schools to distinguish student performance with at least four distinct performance levels (e.g., letter grades or “high-pass,” “pass,” “low pass,” “fail”). If other states were to do the same, it could significantly curtail the incentive for medical students to pad their résumés with more publications.

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