Getting Involved with The Next Generation
There are a variety of ways to get involved with NextGen. Below, you can find information on starting a journal club at your university, submitting articles to NextGen, and more. The more active you are in exploring the field of medicine at this stage, the more developed your perspective and knowledge of the field of medicine will be when you become a practicing clinician.
Suggestion 1: Start a Journal Club at Your University
One of the best ways of learning more about the field of medicine is to begin reading clinical research journals and to discuss your thoughts with your peers. The Next Generation makes this easier by choosing three interesting articles from recent issues of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most influential and well-respected medical journals, and by providing our readers with a set of topics and questions to discuss.
A journal club is simply a group of students or colleagues that gather together to discuss research papers and other articles from research journals. Typically, one of the journal club members would read a research paper, bring copies to the periodic meeting, and briefly present the paper to the others in order to start a discussion. We suggest that you read and discuss one Selected Paper from NEJM or NextGen Special Feature each week. However, you and your peers can run your journal club in the manner that best suits your interests and schedules.
In order to spark discussion and debate across borders and distances, we encourage our readers, particularly those in undergraduate journal clubs, to submit perspective articles, essays and consensus statements to be posted in the Undergraduate Journal Clubs section. If we accept your pieces, we will invite the authors of the Selected Papers from NEJM to respond to your comments, questions and ideas.
Furthermore, if you are interested in reading more articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, you may be able to access NEJM Online through the electronic subscriptions of your university or city library. If this access is not available, you and your peers may consider approaching the President of your university or an appropriate authority for the library system with your interest in obtaining an educational institution license for the New England Journal of Medicine.
Suggestion 2: Write and Submit Perspective Articles for the Undergraduate Journal Clubs Section
We welcome opinion pieces, essays and consensus statements submitted from undergraduate journal clubs or by individual writers. These pieces, after a review and acceptance process, will be located in the Undergraduate Journal Clubs section. We invite the authors of the Selected Papers from NEJM to respond to these pieces and continue a discussion of these topics in medicine across generations of clinicians and scientists.
To submit a perspective article, please visit our Submissions section.
Suggestion 3: Write and Submit Special Features for the Front Page
We welcome contributing writers to submit articles for the NextGen Front Page under certain conditions. Please read the Submission Policies in the Submissions section to learn about what we are interested in publishing.
Suggestion 4: For Harvard Undergraduates Only
If you are an undergraduate student at Harvard College, you may have the opportunity of working as a Student Editor on the staff of The Next Generation or a member of an Editorial Board. There is a limitation to the size of the student staff, and each student editor signs a contract for one year that may or may not be renewed. If you have interest in pursuing a student editorship, you may contact the Editor-in-Chief and request an interview.
Suggestion 5: For All Undergraduates
We are searching for a group of individual undergraduates from different universities who would be interested and willing to review each issue of the Next Generation and provide the NextGen editors with ideas and feedback on the structure and content of the online publication. Discuss with us what you would like to see in terms of selected NEJM papers, NextGen interviews and perspectives, and more! We are constantly working toward making NextGenMD.org more accessible and interesting for premed students and other readers.