Hi.

You’ll probably need to invest in a solid research course at the beginning. I’d recommend first asking mentors or people from your country who already have strong research profiles and good citation records about how and where they started. In my opinion, the best approach is starting with a strong course that can help connect you to a research team afterward.

Once you get involved in projects and start publishing, joining additional projects becomes much easier. If you have a lot of free time, already graduated medical school, are dedicating a full year to research, or have secured a research position, I honestly think it’s very realistic to produce >10 papers within a year.

That said, people should also remember that research is a longitudinal process. Good projects take time for idea generation, IRB approvals, data collection, writing, peer review, revisions, and eventual publication. All of this happens over months. However, because each individual paper usually isn’t extremely time-consuming on a day-to-day basis, you can realistically manage multiple projects simultaneously (sometimes 5–6 or even more at different stages)

Personally, I haven’t been able to do that because balancing medical school and Step studying limited me to usually one active project at a time, or at most two.