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Join someone who already publishes rather than inventing a project. Do an audit first — WA's BPT rubric scores audit and QI alongside publications 1, and CICM bundles audit into one research domain 2. Check your college's recency window before you start: general surgery counts only the last five years 3.
Start with the rubric, not the idea. General surgery counts publications from the last five years only, caps the section at five points, excludes predatory and WASET journals, and allows at most one paper from another surgical specialty 3. Urology wants an impact factor of 3.0 or above 4. Paediatric training and adult BPT in Queensland score publications at zero 5. Knowing which of those applies to you decides whether you need a journal article at all, and a wasted year is the usual cost of not checking.
The cheapest real output is an audit, not a paper. WA's adult BPT written application allocates 7.5 of 100 marks to "Research Evidence", defined to include quality improvement projects and the audit cycle as well as publications 1. CICM's structured CV folds higher degrees, publications, presentations and audit into a single research domain 2. An audit needs no ethics approval in most services, has a supervisor who wants the result, and finishes inside a term.
For an actual paper, attach yourself to someone with a track record. The highest-upvoted answer on the sub is to ask the registrars in your specialty who is publishing and worth working with, then approach that person and offer to help 6. Cold emails work better when you arrive with a question rather than availability — supervisors say the unprepared JMO costs them more time than they save 7.
The counter-argument you should hear. Two things are true at once: the process is substantially about connections and politics 6, and supervisors are drowning in JMOs who want a publication for points 7. Learning the basics — PICO, study hierarchy, PROSPERO registration, PRISMA, enough statistics to talk to a statistician — is what separates you from the queue 7.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Every second JMO wants to do research if they are interested in competitive specialties but these JMOs can be more work than they are assistance for a supervisor.
The simple answer is that you start by joining someone who has a good track record of getting published in impactful journals.
Find out what's necessary in the specialty of your choice, as this can save a lot of unnecessary work.
it's more about connections and politics than anything else
Case reports are harder to publish than audits.
Asked 19 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(get|getting).{0,20}publish|(find|get).{0,25}(research|project|supervisor)|how.{0,25}research/i. Quotes are the top-scoring answers across the three how-to-get-published threads, kept balanced between the practical route and the supervisors' view of JMOs chasing points.