Penn State College of Medicine students create medical journal
Rahul Gupta, Adeel Ahmad, Arshjot Khokhar and Anuj Mehta wanted a place to showcase and disseminate the great research of fellow medical students.
The four medical school friends created Penn State Journal of Medicine, the first publication to display research and casework from Penn State College of Medicine students. They published the inaugural edition online in October.
“It was difficult to get it up and running,” said Gupta a fourth-year emergency medicine student. “Once we started talking about it, there was quite a bit of interest.”
While a faculty adviser helps guide the publication, students run it, from the 20 research paper reviewers, four editors, one webmaster and, of course, those submitting research. Gupta says he and others spent hundreds of hours on the project.
Students are enthusiastic. After Gupta and his team put out a call for submissions, 40 contributions arrived. Through the review process, they chose 13 papers for publication. The work is available to anyone at the College of Medicine ― and the world ― to read.
Much of the submitted research focuses on the cases in which the medical students were involved. Some of the topics of the first edition included issues related to the LGBTQ community and women’s health, face mask materials and how much filtration they provide and neurological disease outcomes.
Faculty and others have congratulated the editors. There appear to be few student-run medical journals in the country.
The plan is to publish the Penn State Journal of Medicine annually. Gupta and his co-editors, Ahmad, Khokhar and Mehta, want to bequeath the publication to other students when they graduate.
“We are hoping the classes below us will step in and see this is worthwhile,” he said. “It is a way to let medical school students be part of a larger conversation on research.”
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