[LSESUguy]

Can anyone provide advice on how I can get involved and mentioned in a medical publication over the next 6 months?

I've got skills from a BSc Economics degree and some employment in trading/banking/finance/research.

I guess I could try to get in contact with certain people and ask the question, mentioning my skills.

Has anyone got any experience in doing this?

Does anyone know of a good source for finding and contacting medics currently researching - especially ones that could do with some assistance?

Any idea of ways that I could help, which I could mention when contacting these guys?

[JumpingJonny]

It takes months alone to get the paper, peer reviewed and possibly published let alone the research so even if you managed to get someone to allow you to come on board a time scale of 6 months to publication is pretty unrealistic.

On a more positive note you would be best contacting professors/PhD students etc in the medical school/life science departments to determine the research they are doing and whether you could partake.

[purplefrog]

It's not something you just hop on into and request your name to be published as you've taken part. The research involved often takes a long period of time to plan, carry out, analyse data and arrive to a conclusion. Further time is then needed to write out a paper in an appropriate format, go through several revisions and edits between the team and close colleagues. After that, you've got to submit your paper to (most likely) several peer-reviewed journals, of which you'll be lucky if one takes up your article. This can take months in itself. And even once that's done, it could be a while (months) before your paper is printed. The whole process is incredibly long, and not to mention competitive. There is absolutely no guarantee your piece of research will end up published.

If you are solely taking an interest into research purely to get your name printed, I suggest not to bother as the commitment required is huge and as said, there is no guarantee. If you are genuinely interested in research, then work out what specific area of biomedical sciences you're interested in, and approach labs/departments where they carry it out. Explain your interest and try to get involved from the start of a project.

[MJK91]

The best way to get your name printed at first is by hard graft -- my name should be on a couple of papers in a few months time because I did a lot of laboratory work for a couple of medic's and their studies. To be a lead author you have to put in a hell of a lot of work over a long period of time; it's not something to take lightly.