Scholarly Project FAQs

Please see the “scholarly project guideline” to read about specific project requirements and contacts. In general, a scholarly project must involve a scholarly product, which can be a publication, presentation at a conference (oral or poster presentation), or a curriculum that has been evaluate. Your scholarly project can be related to your Community Health Learning Experience (CHLE) if you are presenting your CHLE at a conference or publishing data or can be a quality improvement project if it is evaluated and presented at a conference or published.

You should start think about your scholarly project at the start of R2 year and should choose a project by spring of R2 year. Residents who need to evaluate a project like a CHLE, curriculum, or QI project should start with this process early in spring semester of their R2 year as it can take 3-6 months to develop an evaluation and obtain explore IRB review and then another 6 months to gather and analyze the data.

We recommend trying to have close to being wrapped up by December of R3 year and scholarly projects should be completed by March of R3 year. Scholarly projects can be presented at senior night in May of R3 year. If you have written an article, like an FPIN, it should be submitted with all final edits by March of R3 year, although it may be published after graduation as it can take 12-18 months to be published after it is in its final form.

There are several levels of support and mentorship for resident scholarly projects. Your associate program director will check-in with you about scholarly project ideas at biannual APD meetings starting your intern year and connect you with potential mentors and resources. All residents should have a faculty mentor for their scholarly project, which might be their clinic advisor or another faculty with a shared interest (see below). Residents should take the lead on the scholarly project and faculty mentors can provide guidance with things like project design and evaluation, conference submissions, and writing. Residents will check-in and discuss scholarly projects with other residents at clinic education afternoons throughout the year.

See below for potential mentors, although your clinic faculty advisor or any residency faculty can serve as a mentor:

• Writing: Ildi Martonffy, Tom Hahn, Jen Lochner, Sarina Schrager

• Posters/presentations: Ildi Martonffy, Tom Hahn, Jensi Carlson

• FPIN: Lee Dresang (OB), Jonas Lee and Ildi Martonffy (peds), Julia Lubsen (geriatrics)

• Community Health: Karina Atwell, Jennifer Edgoose

• Curriculum evaluation: Tom Hahn, Melissa Stiles

• Quality improvement: Brian Arndt

• Research: Bruce Barrett

• Sports medicine: Kathleen Carr, Erin Hammer

• Women's health: Ann Evensen, Lee Dresang, Sarina Schrager

Yes, collaboration on projects is encouraged. In the past, residents have collaborated together on projects like CHLE projects submitted to conferences, articles, and curriculum development.

Second year residents will receive an introduction to the scholarly project at R2 orientation. The R2/3 seminar series will include seminars about the following topics: turning a project into scholarly work, evaluating a project, writing a successful conference submission abstract, creating a poster, writing a case report. Please see the PowerPoint from Sarina Schrager, MD, MS, about writing a case report.

See the list below for suggestions of where to publish articles. Visit the individual journal websites for author instructions. You can also a resource called JANE. (https://jane.biosemantics.org/). You enter a project title or abstract and it comes up with some journal suggestions.

FPIN Help Desk Answer: This is a brief 300-500 work evidence-based literature review to answer a clinical question. Please see the scholarly project guideline for more about this process.

Case reports:

American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) Case Studies

Current Sports Medicine Reports (journal from the American College of Sports Medicine)

Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM)

Journal of Family Practice (JFP)

Wisconsin Medical Journal (WMJ)

Clinical research

Annals of Family Medicine

Family Medicine

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)

Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM)

Educational/curricular research:

Academic Medicine

Family Medicine

Journal of Graduate Medical Education

MedEdPORTAL

Medical Teacher

PRiMER (useful for pilot studies or small studies)

Wisconsin Medical Journal

Quality improvement or systems research

Family Practice Management (FPM)

See here for a chart of suggested conferences: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s2f0aYPycJDcYfGxcXrHG2zx6qj1uEZpdeY1877hY6Y/edit?usp=sharing

All projects that involve evaluation should be assessed to determine if they are research (and need IRB review) or if they are quality improvement/program evaluation and do not require IRB review. See the website below to learn more about this and to access a self-certification tool to determine if your project needs to be reviewed by the university IRB.

https://kb.wisc.edu/hsirbs/page.php?id=33386

The DFMCH works with statisticians through UW-Madison ICTR who can help with data analysis and statistical support. Use the link below to request biostats support: https://ictr.wisc.edu/consults/biostatistics-2/

You can also find this link on the DFMCH website at:

https://www.fammed.wisc.edu/research/links-for-researchers/biostatistics-support/