These guidelines are meant to optimize our research teams and to provide guidance in difficult decisions such as the determination of authorship.

1. Our goal is to publish high quality research/academic content and provide research and mentorship opportunities for residents and medical students in our community. This is all so each individual will be able to reach the career goals they aspire to.
2. Students should commit to being involved in research for at least 1-2 years when asking to be connected to a research project.
3. Students are expected to send monthly emails on the firsts Monday of the month to their project teams. This helps students stay connected and keeps everyone on track. Refer here for instructions: Start Here: Research Onboarding and Resources
4. Resident and Attendings should commit to responding to research focused emails within 7-10 days to keep project momentum
5. Each project will have a designated project leader. Project leaders are usually experienced 3rd-4th year medical students or residents.
6. Medical students will have graduated roles as follows based on their previous experience. Students in their first year will start at Lit Review/Data collection/Intro/Method writing, and graduate to writing results/discussion, project design and eventual project leadership in their 3-4 years:
   1. Lit review
   2. Data collection
   3. Data Analysis
   4. Writing intro, methods, results, abstracts, conclusions
   5. Writing discussions
   6. Study design
   7. Project leadership
7. Authorship positioning will be determined by the project’s team leader based on the level of contribution and journal requirements. This is meant to be an equitable process that takes into account responsibility held, time involvement, and other factors of contribution. Attendings have the final say about this and can trump the team leaders decision-making and journals can sometimes severely limit the number of authors or have specific criteria for authorship determination. Sometimes journals allow co-lead authors and co-senior authors.
   1. Students or residents that drop off projects by not maintaining their active involvement should not expect an authorship position
   2. All research team members are expected to be involved until publication is completed, should any member stop contributing before project completion they may not be added in the author list, as decided on a case-by-case basis by the project team lead and PI.
8. Communication is a good thing. If you are swamped with other things just give your team leader a heads up.
9. Maintain professionalism and drive, research is an excellent way to connect with the residency and attendings in a meaningful way. This can help with LORs and accomplish academic goals.
10. You MUST be driven to keep work moving even without constant direction/validation from residents and attendings. Residents will get very busy and in those time, your desire to keep a project moving will be one of the most important factors in pushing a project to completion.
11. We prioritize team work and a mindset that research is not a zero-sum game.
12. Medical students should never sacrifice their Step scores for more research. For first and second years, more research will not overcome poor step scores.
13. Medical students should aim for not being on more than 2-3 research projects at a time.
14. Keep a detailed list of what you worked on and what you specifically contributed to each study for your future applications.
15. The MSU Ortho Research community will be maintained in perpetuity in cooperation with the Ortho Resident Research Leader and the MSU Ortho Interest Group Research Leaders. The expectation is that information within these documents, the research study list, and project leadership will be passed to the next group to ensure sustainability in the long term.
16. Medical students can work remotely for Spectrum Research projects as long as they are still MSU CHM students. This is not possible for OAM based research projects (OAM data collection has to be in person at OAM’s office).
17. Leader responsibilities breakdown:

Research Leader Responsibilities

1. Tiered Research Mentorship breakdown: