Research 101

By the end of the four blocks, a resident can:

• Convert a clinical observation into an answerable question and choose a feasible scholarly pathway for it.
• Run a reproducible literature search — saved strategy, date, and counts — and critically appraise what it returns.
• Distinguish a narrative, scoping, rapid, and systematic review — and say when a meta-analysis is inappropriate.
• Explain the institutional path from idea through determination, data access, analysis, and publication — and why none of it is self-determined.
• Identify and evaluate mentors on evidence and assemble the team early.
• Use AI within the rules below while remaining personally accountable for every fact and citation.

Each block sends residents out with an artifact faculty can inspect — a case triage sheet, an authorship-and-journal plan, a one-page study concept, a mentor compact and multi-year plan — because “understands” is not an outcome.

And one rule spans all four blocks: the mentor arrives at week zero. Block 4 teaches choosing and keeping mentors, but every earlier block assumes provisional guidance already exists — before a case is committed to, before data is touched, before a review protocol is drafted. Mentorship is the mechanism, not the reward.

The AI ground rules, curriculum-wide — three tiers, applied in every block:

• Generally fine within policy: brainstorming search terms, explaining unfamiliar methods, reformatting text you wrote, rehearsal questions.
• Only with institutional approval, secure tools, and expert validation: screening or extraction support, statistical code, figure generation, translation, anything touching nonpublic research material.
• Never: entering PHI, identifiable case details, confidential manuscripts or reviews, or restricted data into unapproved tools; inventing citations or data; presenting generated prose, images, or numbers unverified; listing AI as an author; concealing material use.

Three durable principles under all of it: nothing sensitive into unapproved systems; disclose the tool and purpose where the venue requires it; humans remain accountable for accuracy, originality, privacy, and reproducibility. The anchors: ICMJE’s AI guidance (AI cannot be an author; use is disclosed), and NIH’s rules that applications substantially developed by AI are not considered the applicant’s original ideas and generative AI is prohibited in NIH peer review.

Scheduling: the natural home is a dedicated research half-day in the early fall of intern year — September to November, once interns have admitted enough patients to be carrying candidate cases — with all four blocks and a break after block 2. Where no half-day exists, run it as a four-part series inside noon conference or academic half-day, keeping the same cohort and facilitator throughout. Blocks 1 and 2 also stand alone as a complete case-report curriculum for programs that want only that.

Leaders: blocks 1 and 2 need a faculty member who has personally lived the submission–rejection–revision cycle, repeatedly; block 3 wants the same plus a guest biostatistician or data scientist for thirty minutes — an intern who remembers “come see us before you collect data” has absorbed the block’s entire value; block 4 needs a faculty member whose publication record shows trainee first authors, co-led by a chief or senior with a real story.

The implementation list — addressed to the chief residents and program leadership who will run this, because the local layer is yours, not this site’s. Gather before teaching:

• Your institution’s poster template and printing process.
• The research-day date and abstract deadline, plus regional meeting dates.
• Your IRB/HRPP’s case-report policy and determination route — who issues which determination, through what form, at what typical turnaround.
• The data-capture platform access process for residents, the clinical data-warehouse request process, and the databases your residents can actually reach.
• The biostatistics-consulting intake for trainees.
• Your library’s predatory-journal guidance and open-access or publication-fund agreements — plus the person who approves a resident publication expense.
• The grants office and the local trainee-funding calendar.
• Local examples of resident scholarship in the overlooked lanes.
• Above all: a transparent mentor directory — each faculty member’s expertise, the roles residents actually play with them, current capacity, prior trainee products, and meeting norms — assembled with program leadership. Block 4’s real payload.

(Confidential mentee feedback belongs with the program, reviewed by leadership — not attached to names as informal labels.)

What this module deliberately does not do: it does not teach advanced statistics — it teaches what power, p-values, and effect sizes mean and when to call the biostatistician, because knowing where your competence ends is the competency; it does not push every intern toward research — scholarship is one door-opener among several, not a mandate; and it does not train a resident to independently lead a therapeutic trial or write a federal career grant — but it deliberately opens both doors: the grant ladder that starts at travel awards and society trainee grants and climbs through institutional pilots toward mentor-led federal work, and the real roles residents play inside existing prospective studies and trials — screening, recruitment, data collection, protocol adherence, abstracts, and secondary analyses — because early posters and case reports are precisely how multicenter collaborations, trial participation, and funded work begin. The test for any such role: genuine intellectual development and fair authorship, not service work alone.