A Long-Term, Sustainable, Inclusive, International Model for Facilitating Junior Doctors and Medical Student–led Publishing

Abstract

Medical student textbooks are traditionally written by senior clinicians, with little if any input from medical students or junior doctors (“juniors”). However, juniors have been shown to be effective educators in various teaching settings. They have a good appreciation of the learning needs and styles of contemporary students. We hypothesized such benefits of junior-led teaching could be successfully applied to medical textbooks. 

This article describes the Unofficial Guide to Medicine project, a novel, junior-led approach to textbook writing. We discuss the process from the recruitment of juniors through to the final publication of a textbook, comparing and contrasting our approach with more traditional publishing models. The specific roles juniors perform and their potential progression from junior reviewer to editor is explained, as is the collaboration with senior clinicians. Juniors not only lead the process of writing, but also editing, graphic design, and print review. The use of social media to gain feedback from a large cohort of juniors during the book writing process and the positive effects this has on the development of titles is highlighted, as are the potential difficulties this dynamic writing model produces.

We finish by looking at feedback from the published titles from the series, discussing the
benefits to those juniors who participate and describe how you can get involved.