Timothy Brown, Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director at UT Southwestern Medical Center, shared Charles Jiang’s, Assistant Professor medical oncologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, post on X, adding:
“They don’t teach you this in school but this is exactly how to execute on a high impact idea․”
Quoting Charles Jiang‘s post:
“My first paper in PGY2 residency landed in JAMA Oncology, and the truth is it was won before I ran a single analysis. It came down to how I chose the question. 8 Years later, I realized that very few trainees got taught about how to pick a first research idea. Lets try a bit:
- Start with the most common mistake I see. Trainees believe a good project begins with a clever method or a big dataset. It begins with a question. The method serves the question. Flip that order and you spend a year polishing an answer nobody asked for.
- A good idea survives three questions. Is there a real knowledge gap. Who cares. Can I do it in the time I have. Write them on one page before you touch data. That page decides more than any analysis you will run later.
- Real gap means an actual hole in what the field knows, not a topic that merely sounds interesting. Test it fast: if the answer already sits in a textbook or a recent review, you are doing homework. Move on before you get attached.
- “Who cares” is where most first ideas quietly die. Picture the specific reader who sees your title and leans in. A clinician, a patient, a guideline committee. If you don’t know your audience, no journal will care either.
- Now the trap that wastes the most time: choosing a question too big to finish. Trials cost millions and run for years. You have three to five months if lucky. A brilliant question you cannot deliver is just a daydream with citations.
- Another trap: believing effort equals journal tier. It does not. A simple question, answered cleanly, beats a heroic build that never ends. Aim for simple, not trivial. My best paper often did not take me a lot of time . The skill is finding a small question that still matters.
- The deepest trap: chasing rigor while ignoring importance. Top journals reward importance first. Read them every week and watch what earns space. Training your taste for what matters is the real work of choosing an idea, and it compounds over a career.
The whole game is choosing a question that matters and that you can finish. Everything else is execution. I break down the rest of the playbook here for trainees and the faculty who mentor them. Follow along if you are starting out or mentoring someone who is.”
Other articles about Timothy Brown and Charles Jiang on OncoDaily.