The benefits of research focus

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it's a pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. Today we're talking about the benefits of research focus, and the reason I want to talk to you about this today is because the last couple of weeks, I've been in what I call a grant writing vortex.

1:23 You know when you have a number of grant submissions and you're doing back-to-back submissions? I imagine you've either been there or have witnessed someone who's done that, and I will tell you that it really does feel like a vortex. I probably have upward of 200 emails that I still need to go back and process, but one of the things that was so helpful in the place of writing these three grants is that even though it really did take a lot to pull these grants together, one thing that was helpful was that the grants were all along the same theme, and so I wasn't submitting the same grant over and over again. It really was a different grant each time, but it was all in the same theme, in the same disease space, in the same area of disease focus, and so I'm interested in thrombotic thermocytopenic perfora and bringing patients to early diagnosis.

2:11 I'm a health services researcher, and I was able to kind of with the same patient population and with the same focus write three separate grants, and it was cool to be able to do that, and I recognized in doing that the advantage of research focus. I don't know about you, but a lot of times kind of over the course of my evolution, still evolving as a clinician scientist, mentors would say, you've got to choose one thing and focus like a laser, and you know how hard it is to focus? I'm an internist, right? I as an internal medicine physician, I love so many things.

2:52 I didn't subspecialized right away. I didn't subspecialize right away because I love internal medicine, and many of us are interested in many things, and it's like how can we do just one? And so the whole recommendation to focus is hard, but I understood its benefits with these last three submissions, and I just want to share with you why you should also consider choosing only one area of focus in your research program. Okay, so I have five reasons. The very first one I want to share is the depth of expertise that you can have. The more you specialize, the deeper you go, the more you know, the more you become the expert in this one space.

3:39 And it is so helpful because it means you're not always having to go looking for new information. Every time you have to create a new grant or create a new presentation in an area that's outside of your focus, it takes a long time to do that because you have to go read the literature and then you have to see, well, what's new and what is the gap. The more you work in one area, the more you understand the area, the more you understand the nuances, the more you understand the gaps that need to be filled, and it just becomes easier to grow your expertise in this space.

4:20 And so it's one of those things where the more you put in effort, the more grants you write out of this research focus, the more papers you write out of this research focus, the more presentations come out of this research focus, the more understanding you have about this one subject matter. And for this reason, whenever somebody has a question in this one area, you're the go-to person because, hey, it's pretty much all that you do. And so there's value to having that deep level of expertise in one subject. And yes, you may feel like, oh, but that's so boring, but every area is so deep.

5:03 It's like you skin the surface or you go really deep. It really gives you permission and opportunity to go deep into one area, and there's so much opportunity in that. And so if you are someone who's thinking about why focus in one research field, one benefit is the depth of expertise that you develop, which makes it easier to continue to produce things along the area of your research expertise. So that's another thing. The second thing I would say is that it helps you to have very clear goals, clarity, such clarity. And clarity is important if you're ever going to propose some work.

5:50 You're going to write a grant proposal. If you are so clear on what you're doing and where you're going, it's easier to make it obvious to the person who's reading your grant that you are clear. They can see where you're going because you can see where you're going. If you're fuzzy, they're fuzzy. And the reason they're fuzzy is because, well, if you're fuzzy, then you can't present a clear picture of where you're going. And so the ability to focus in one area allows you to think about that area over and over and over again until you get to a point of clarity of how you want to contribute, how you want to take the gaps and fill them, and what it leads you to. What's the next step? And what's the next step? What's the next step after that? And it allows you to set priorities, to plan the studies that you're going to do or the experiments, and it allows you to measure progress really well.

6:39 You're just very clear because it's like this is the one area of focus. Okay, there might be different things within this area of focus, but there's only one direction in which we're going. There's one big outcome that we're trying to get to, and it just allows you to have that clarity. And I have to tell you that clarity is a gift in life. For you to have clarity on where you're going is so powerful because when you know where you're going, then you can set the direction. It's like a GPS. You put in the address of where you're going, and yeah, you could take maybe three ways to get there, but there are only three ways to get there. There's not three million ways to get there. Now three million ways, super confusing.

7:20 Three or four, you can do that. And so it just helps you have clarity. The moment you have a focus, you know exactly where you're going, it really gives you clarity. And when you have clarity, you can share your clarity with others, and they're able to see where you're going and hopefully fund your grant. The third reason is the ability to have impact. It is the ability to have impact. So if you publish one paper in one area, it's one paper and it's valuable, you know, and thank you very much for your contribution. The more you publish in that space, the more you have impact because you are creating the body of literature that defines that space.

8:04 And so that allows you to really, really have impact. That allows you to really move your work forward in a way that gives you increased stability, that allows you to build collaborations, and allows you to disseminate and apply your findings. So the more you are focused in one area, the more, you know, a couple of the experiments or a couple of your studies really move the field forward, as opposed to just kind of like a one-time study that you do, which can still be important and significant, but it's nowhere near the same as doing multiple studies in one area. It really allows your findings to go so much further.

8:47 And so the power of focus in your research program allows you to have increased impact in just one space where it's measurable. People can say, wow, this is what you've done because you've done multiple things in this one area. So the benefit of focus is the fact that it gives you increased impact. Okay. Another thing is it allows you to be efficient. Hmm, I love this one, efficiency. So one thing that you want to do, and I hope you're able to do, is align your clinical work with your clinical research focus or with your research focus. And it's so helpful because when you see patients, you're thinking about your research. When you're doing your research, you're thinking about your patients, and they build on top of each other.

9:31 It means every clinical experience you have in this space benefits your research, and it means every research activity you do benefits your clinical work. And so they build on top of each other. It allows your effort to go further because you're not divided between different spaces. And so it helps you be super efficient. You can build on your prior work, and over time, you're accumulating knowledge and data that's always relevant, that's always helpful. And even when your progress seems tiny, even when it seems incremental, over time, it's like a snowball. It has just very, very, very small growth, and then it expands, and it really, really compounds.

10:16 It's like compound interest. And so the fact that you're able to focus in one space and move one foot forward in front of the other allows you to really become efficient, and it allows you to compound the effects of your knowledge. So it really helps you become efficient. And that's even... Actually, that's my next one. Sorry. I was jumping ahead of myself there. Number five is that it makes grant proposals easier to write. Okay. So why is it easier to write? Well, if I'm writing about TTP, and then I go to write the next grant, a lot of the stuff is still relevant.

10:57 And so, yes, it may not be the exact same significance and innovation, but there's a lot of overlap. And a lot of the foundational information I need to write one grant in TTP is the same information I need to write the next grant, and the next grant, and the next grant after that. And it makes it easier to put proposals together because there's overlap in the big theme, and it allows you to now focus on the nuances of how the approach might be different, how the aims might be different. And then another thing that's a side benefit, still within the umbrella of making the grant proposal writing a little bit easier, is that many times, funding agencies want to see a clear focus, a clear research agenda, so that they can see where this research will go.

11:44 When people talk about the future directions, when you're focused in one area, one thing builds on top of the other, build on top of the other, so that the path forward becomes more clear than if it feels like, well, you're just taking one bite out of this puzzle. Where is this going? And so it definitely helps. It makes it easier for you to write the proposals because you're able to take things from the last proposal and incorporate it into the next one, and then take things from this one, incorporate it into the next one, and it really is powerful to be able to do that. And so anyways, I just want to talk about these things, and so actually I'll recap. So I talked about five things. So number one is that it really allows you to have a depth of expertise.

12:27 Number two is that it helps you to set very clear research goals, and having that clarity is so, so powerful. Another thing it helps you do is increase your impact, and then helps you be efficient in your research when you can overlap the work you're doing in your clinical work with the work you're doing in your research space as well. It allows you to build on your prior work, and then it makes grant proposal writing a little bit easier because you are literally not creating anything new with the next grant. You're creating some new things, but you're able to repurpose a lot, which makes your grant writing efforts go a lot further. So those are some of the reasons why it's helpful to have research focus.

13:07 Now again, you may be interested in many things, and it's great to be interested in many things, but it's really good when you select one area and really move forward with it because you're able to move forward with it so much faster, and you become known for this one thing. Anyway, so I encourage you to think about it, think about how you can incorporate that into your grant writing and into kind of moving your research career forward. If that's been helpful to you, please send me a DM. Let me know how it was helpful. Better still, leave a voicemail on our website, ClinicianResearcherPodcast.com, and share your thoughts about the benefit of having a research focus. And if you are the person to leave a voicemail, we will play it on one of the next episodes and I'll incorporate it into a future episode.

13:59 So I hope you'll take time to do that. All right, please share this podcast with someone else who needs to hear it. I look forward to talking with you again the next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.