Medical School Launches Student-Run, Peer-Reviewed Journal

UPDATED: March 2, 2014, at 11:20 p.m.

HMS students Noor M.R. Beckwith ‘11, Omar Abudayyeh, and Jay Kumar and teaching assistant Adam Frange, founders of the Harvard Medical Student Review, pose together for the launch of the online journal. By Courtesy of the Harvard Medical Student Review

The Harvard Medical Student Review—a new, online student-run and peer-reviewed medical journal—will launch Monday under the leadership of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Dental School, and students and staff from the Harvard School of Public Health.

The founders of the Review include Medical School students Noor M. R. Beckwith ’11, Omar Abudayyeh, and Jay Kumar and Medical School teaching assistant Adam Frange. The founders said that the review will provide a forum for students to discuss current issues in health and medicine.

Abudayyeh, a second-year student at the Medical School, said that there “are such vibrant debates in the halls of our school with no outlet for students to express them.”

The journal aims to provide a platform for students’ ideas, said Kumar, a second-year student at the Medical School.

The Review’s content will include narratives, reflections on medical school and patient experiences, paintings, case reports, and articles on research and global health initiatives.

“In medicine, writing has not been encouraged as formally,” said Beckwith, a second-year student at the Medical School. “The journal provides a new space to make writing a larger part of the student experience.”

The founders said that they discovered that the Harvard administration was supportive of their efforts to launch the journal.

“This journal will allow the world to know what the next generation of physician and physician scientists are talking about,” Nancy E. Oriol, the Medical School Dean for Students and a member of the Review's advisory board, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson.

Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier expressed his support for the journal in an e-mail to The Crimson.

“I am continually impressed by the initiative shown by our HMS students,” he wrote. “They are seeking to make a difference in medicine.”

The journal aims to facilitate dialogue between communities at Harvard, affiliated hospitals, and surrounding academic institutions such as the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and the Simmons College of Nursing.

The journal allows for submissions from different graduate schools in a variety of formats, including scholarly articles, editorials, poetry, and art.

The Review’s elaborate editing process is based on Harvard Medicine magazine and an automated editing system inspired by the Harvard Law Review, according to Frange.

The journal’s founders said that they hope that the launch of the Review will inspire similar student-run, peer-reviewed journals at other universities.

“The work published and the editorial choices made by the students will offer a window into who they are and what matters to them,” Oriol said.

—Staff writer Steven H. Tenzer can be reached at stenzer@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections:

CORRECTION: March 2, 2014

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified one of the schools that will oversee the Harvard Medical Student Review. In fact, the Dental School will join the Medical School and the School of Public Health in overseeing the publication. The article also incorrectly stated the number of years two of the founders of the Harvard Medical Student Review have studied at the Medical School. In fact, both Noor M.R. Beckwith and Jay Kumar are second-year students.