Increasing medical student participation in scholarly publications at a primary care-focused medical school

Research and scholarly activity during medical education can support medical students’ ability to apply skills learned in the curriculum, develop professional networks, explore new interests, and strengthen their application for residency programs. Existing programs developed to facilitate medical student scholarly activity have typically resulted in poster or oral presentations of student work, but have encountered barriers to guiding student projects towards peer-reviewed publication. We sought to evaluate how a novel approach of offering both mentorship and logistical support for student scholarly activity within a school-level office contributed to medical students’ output of peer-reviewed publications. The Office of Clinical and Educational Scholarship (OCES) was established in 2021. Students graduating between 2015 and 2024 were included in the evaluation, and student publications during medical school were tracked using PubMed. Mixed-effects regression models quantified the association between OCES establishment and student publication outcomes in each calendar year. The proportion of students with a publication increased from 14% to 51% between the Classes of 2015–2024. Among the Class of 2024, the OCES team coauthored or consulted on 34 of 81 unique publications. On multivariable analysis, OCES establishment doubled students’ odds of having any publication in a given calendar year (odds ratio: 2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.3,4.0; <i>p</i> = 0.003) and the number of publications per year (incidence rate ratio: 2.2; 95% CI: 1.4,3.4; <i>p</i> = 0.001). By offering both mentorship and logistical support for scholarly projects in a centralized, flexible model, our office supported student engagement in scholarly work at students’ own pace, and facilitated an increase in the proportion of students graduating with a publication to over half of the graduating class. This strategy can help other institutions meet students’ demand for research opportunities progressing to publication, while helping students balance scholarly efforts with their medical school curriculum and other extracurricular activities.