Have Your Eyes Open Posted on December 3, 2007 Michael E. Thase (bio) outlines the benefits of joining a 50-investigator study that will not result in authorship for you.

As far as how an early career investigator can gauge whether an industry funded project is “worth” being involved with or not, it’s important to have your eyes open, and to know that if you’re enrolling eight patients in a 400-patient study that it really is unlikely, since there will have to be 50 other people also enrolling eight patients. It’s really unlikely that this will be a 51-authored paper.

If we don’t do these studies we won’t have new medications, so there is a small contribution in an altruistic way to being one of 50 investigators in a large study.

But usually the early career investigator opts to be one of 50 investigators in such a study for the experience, and in part, for the autonomy for working on his or her own project within their site, as opposed to always working for his or her mentor. And the budgets of these projects are usually relatively generous, and as a result one can begin to build up a little bit of a discretionary or surplus fund if one is efficient and manages things responsibly.

That can be then used at your discretion for things that facilitate your program: video/audio tape equipment so that you can do a better job monitoring reliability, a new computer to improve your data handling and management capacities, professional travel.

How one’s discretionary funds are used varies from department to department. But the two motivations, generally, for being one of 50 investigators in a study that won’t lead to authorship is, number one, the autonomy and the experience of doing it, which can then serve you for future collaborations in which your own scientific program is moved forward. And then getting some resource that can improve your program’s ability to move those investigator-initiated projects forward.

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