Students

Student Contributions to Speaking of Medicine

PLoS Medicine host contributions from students on this blog, Speaking of Medicine. As we stressed in the post introducing the student section of the blog, we invite all medical students to share their experiences, views on critical health issues, hopes for the future of medicine, opinions on the medical education system and how it can be improved, as well as their thoughts on any other topic relevant to global health issues that they’d like to blog about.

Student blogs include:

- The role of medical students in limiting the spread of antimicrobial resistance by Adam Castaño, Sujal Parikh and Eunice Yu, medical students at the University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

- Uniting Tanzanian medical students to reverse the brain drain by Evance L Mmbando, 3rd year medical student, Weill-Bugando University College of Health Sciences, Tanzania

- The dawning era of personalized medicine exposes a gap in medical education by Keyan Salari, PhD Candidate at Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine and MD Candidate at Stanford Medical School

To contribute to the blog, students should email pieces between 200-700 words in length to studentforum@plos.org. A PLoS Medicine editor will evaluate each submission, and if a piece is approved for posting, a member of the staff will post it on the student’s behalf. Students will be informed in advance of their piece being posted. We hope to make decisions and post quickly.

Why should medical students read PLoS Medicine?

PLoS Medicine brings the best medical research in all disciplines to medical students throughout the world, and explains what it means for professionals and patients. Students can find a unique, global perspective on current medical debates and analyses of vital health issues, including social medicine, neglected diseases, and key controversies. PLoS Medicine helps students keep up to date with important areas of research, policy, and practice. The journal will actively engage medical students from all over the world without subjecting them to drug advertising or other unnecessary marketing.

By offering free access and redistribution rights for all our articles, PLoS Medicine aims to bring the latest medical research to a global audience. Our unique and rigorous review process is run as a collaborative effort between an international team of academic editors, who are experts in their field, and experienced, full-time professional editors working to ensure fairness and consistency. The journal is international and inclusive, covering global health issues, neglected diseases, health policy, and vital debates in medicine, with easy-to-read, professionally written summaries provided for each research article.

Watch this video, made by a Grad student, about why open access matters to him.

Rate and Comment on PLoS Medicine articles

The PLoS Medicine Web site provides a number of ‘Web 2.0′ tools to facilitate community evaluation and discourse around published articles. There are three major components to our Web 2.0 tools:

1. Notes: Notes apply to a specific point in the Web version of the article text and should be used to highlight a minor point, to make additions or clarifications, or to identify and link to material, including more extensive discussions presented elsewhere.
2. Comments: Comments are of a more general nature, leading to threaded discussions concerning the content, conclusions, and consequences of a specific article.
3. Ratings: Users can assign individual ratings to articles, which are then aggregated to provide overall ratings and rankings of articles.

We would like to encourage you to use these tools and to comment on our articles: you can read more about this functionality and how you can get involved here.

Open Students

Open Students is a blog about open access news and research, aimed specifically at students. It includes information about student outreach campaigns, student journals, theses and open access.