In the race to get into competitive medical residency training, today’s medical students are chasing something that may surprise you: scientific abstracts, posters, workshops, and research papers.

Lots of them. Not necessarily new ideas or meaningful research—just enough to stack their résumés and stand out during the screening of their application for postgraduate residency match. But while scholarship can be a powerful tool in shaping their future, there’s a growing question that deserves attention: What are they giving up—the time and space to become humanistic, compassionate, competent physicians?

This trend didn’t arise in a vacuum. In 2022, the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 shifted from a three-digit score to pass/fail, aiming to reduce student stress and de-emphasize rote memorization. However, this eliminated one of the few standardized metrics residency programs used for initial applicant screening. In its place, research and scholarship surged—students began publishing papers and other scholarship early in medical school, with first-author publications becoming key for competitive residency placement. Meanwhile, the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination clinical skills exam, suspended during COVID-19, was never reinstated—further signaling that bedside clinical excellence may no longer be necessary for the career.

Many students now devote significant time to research early in medical school—often at the cost of developing clinical skills and attitudes. Hours spent editing manuscripts replace time at the bedside, practicing physical exams, diagnostic clinical maneuvers, or learning patient communication. Some rush through clerkships, balancing clinical duties with abstract deadlines. The result is a cohort that’s academically productive but underprepared for the humanism, clinical reasoning, empathy, compassion, and kindness. The bedside skills aren’t learned through slides; they develop slowly, through real patient encounters, mentorship, role models, and reflection. When research becomes the main currency of success in matching into a desired specialty, core humanistic values risk being sidelined.

Ask any U.S. medical student and they’ll confirm: To match into competitive specialties like neurosurgery, orthopedics, ophthalmology, urology, or dermatology, you need a steady stream of research—abstracts, posters, and papers—whether or not you care or enjoy doing research. Much of this work is rushed, low-quality, or only loosely related to clinical practice. Students often take a full year off, unpaid, to boost their publication count. Meanwhile, the rise of predatory journals and abstracts-friendly conferences has created even more outlets to pad CVs. This shift pulls focus away from clinical skill, reasoning, and the human side of medicine. Future doctors are analyzing datasets instead of examining patients, comforting families, or practicing diagnostic skills at the bedside. In chasing publications, they risk losing the time and space needed to grow into curious, compassionate, and humanistic physicians.

Medical students aren’t to blame. They’re responding rationally to a flawed system of shifting competition from the medical school curriculum to unpaid, free research by students for faculty and medical schools. The graduate medical education residency programs lean heavily on what they can measure—research output. The medical schools and hospitals, eager to climb the national rankings, often incentivize student publications with faculty over clinical excellence or professional identity development.

What kind of doctors are we creating for future clinical care?

Research is essential to medicine, no question. But when it overshadows the very purpose of medical education—training physicians to care for human beings—we have a problem. Patients don’t care if their doctor has five publications in PubMed. They care if their doctor listens, diagnoses and treats accurately, and shows up when it counts.

Medicine is a high-stakes, high-accountability profession where mediocrity can have devastating consequences. Doctors are not merely participants in a team—they are often the final decision-makers, the “captain of the ship,” responsible for making executive clinical judgments that can determine life or death.

From this perspective, clinical competence is seen as a vital driver of excellence. Just as athletes reach peak performance by striving to outperform and push themselves harder when faced with measurable benchmarks and rankings in clinical competence and knowledge. Moreover, some argue that without the pressure of clinical sciences and knowledge competition, students may settle for “good enough” or “accepted minimal competence” instead of striving for mastery and excellence. If a culture of minimal competence is allowed to replace excellence in performance expectations—masked in the name of scholarship and research—it could lead to underprepared physicians who falter when faced with real-world clinical responsibility and excellence in care.

We may need to redefine what success looks like and help students frame learning medicine as mastery. The educators need to instill the purpose of their career and social accountability and not just the prestige of medical specialties. There is a need to frame bedside learning as a privilege and mandatory task, and not learning from a computer or “I” patient, as said by Abraham Verghese. Every patient is a living document. You need to listen, care, and go the extra mile for them. We need more observations and reflections with bedside stories from their role models. We need to create a culture that celebrates bedside learning and does not see it as an unnecessary added routine, as suggested in some recent prestigious journal publications. The residency directors need to start knowing their students early in the application cycle through more holistic assessments from audition electives and live interviews for their passion for the field and bedside clinical care, judgment, and moral reasoning.

Without humanism, health care risks becoming transactional, particularly for vulnerable or marginalized populations. As technology accelerates, bedside presence serves as a vital counterbalance: a reminder that health care is not only about fixing bodies but about caring for people. If we don’t correct, we risk training a generation of doctors who are well-credentialed on paper but underprepared at the bedside—lacking clinical judgment, compassion, and humanism. In a profession rooted in trust and care, that’s a loss society can’t afford.

Vijay Rajput is an internal medicine physician.