It’s Never Too Early to Start: Let’s Curate Your Online Scholarly Presence for Residency Applications

Abstract

Introduction/Background: A student’s residency application includes various components such as personal statements, letters of recommendation, medical school transcripts and exam scores. With the shift to pass/fail exams, residency applications now rely more heavily on qualitative measures. Reviewers must evaluate applicants based on other markers of excellence, making scholarly activity documentation increasingly important. To better support IUSM students, we aim to teach both students and mentors how to effectively claim and promote their scholarly work online, enhancing their visibility and impact. This initiative aligns with the IUSM strategic plan to maximize learner success statewide, particularly the goal of ensuring learners are well-prepared for their next professional transition. Workshop objective: After our workshop, participants will be able to upload individual scholarly items to our institutional repository, IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks; list those works on their ORCiD profile; create a Google Scholar profile; understand basic individual research metrics; and consider any other online footprints Learning Goals: The goals of our workshop are to introduce the idea and benefit of a scholarly online presence to students at any stage of their undergraduate medical education career; set students up with this career-long skill of maintaining their works, which is much easier to begin curating earlier in their career; and encourage early career students to explore options for research projects with faculty. Methods: Participants will be introduced to the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS). The online ERAS worksheet will be utilized, particularly the publications section. We will demonstrate how to upload a scholarly work to our institutional repository. The persistent link created from our upload can be placed in the ERAS publication section, in our online ORCID profile, and will appear in Google Scholar after a few weeks. Resources will be shared encouraging students to consider collaborating on research projects with faculty.