Medical students' research - facilitators and barriers.

BACKGROUND: Undergraduate research in medicine is important to expose and encourage the students towards the newer advances and research practices. The present study was taken up in a medical institute to assess the perception of the medical faculty about research undertaken by the medical undergraduates, and identifying the barriers faced by them in training undergraduate students for research.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: A questionnaire on perceptions, barriers and limitations towards undergraduate research was distributed to 105 participants included in the study. The responses of the participants were collected on a five point Likert scale and analysed using spss version 11.5.

RESULTS: There was a strong agreement among the faculty about students' interest in carrying out research (95.1%), and that they had gained knowledge to design, conduct, present and publish their research from the projects undertaken by them (90.2%). Among the barriers for training undergraduate research, time consumption was perceived as a barrier by the participating medical teachers (37.7%) followed by lack of motivation and commitment among students (19.7%). Time constraint was the commonest reason for the faculty in not guiding undergraduate research (39.0%). A larger proportion of medical teachers suggested that incentives for students and teachers (62.7%) and frequent workshops for students related to undergraduate research (61.8%) are likely to encourage the students and teachers and thus, improve the scenario.

CONCLUSION: It is suggested to address certain important issues like reducing the workload of faculty engaged in undergraduate research, and conducting frequent research methodology workshops for the under graduate students to improvise the standards of undergraduate research.