Winner of the education, training and medical professionalism category at the 2026 RCP virtual poster competition, medical student Ben Macfarlane discusses here how he transformed a student-led journal club into a national initiative and suite of digital platforms designed to tackle some of the biggest barriers to research engagement in undergraduate medicine.
Research is central to modern medicine. As future doctors, we need to be able to find, understand and apply evidence throughout our careers. Yet, for many medical students, developing these skills can feel challenging.
While journal clubs are a familiar feature of postgraduate training, opportunities for undergraduate students to develop critical appraisal skills, engage with research and explore academic careers remain inconsistent. Many of us find it difficult to access research opportunities, understand academic pathways and build research experience alongside our studies.
It was this challenge that inspired me and some of my colleagues from universities across Scotland to create a national student-led journal club, bringing together students from the universities of Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
Our project, which won the education, training and medical professionalism category at the 2026 RCP virtual poster competition, demonstrates that students are not only identifying gaps in medical education but developing practical solutions to address them.
During 2025–26, we delivered five online journal club sessions, providing structured opportunities for students to critically evaluate research, discuss evidence and develop confidence in presenting scientific literature. Our analysis of participant feedback found significant improvements in confidence across several areas, including critical appraisal, discussing research, presenting findings and interest in pursuing a career in academic medicine. Participants particularly valued the peer-led nature of the sessions and the opportunity for structured discussion.
But the most interesting finding came from what happened next.
We used feedback from participants not simply to evaluate the programme, but to understand the wider barriers students face when trying to engage with research. Students repeatedly highlighted challenges that extended beyond the journal club itself. These included gaining access to research opportunities, understanding academic career pathways, building competitive portfolios and developing independent critical appraisal skills.
One comment captured the issue succinctly: there remains ‘quite a jump from lab experience to being published as lead author’.
Rather than seeing these barriers as beyond the scope of our project, we treated them as opportunities to innovate. The feedback directly informed our development of two student-built digital platforms designed to support engagement with research beyond individual teaching sessions.
The first, StrataHub, helps students discover research projects, track their portfolio activities and explore academic training pathways. It has already attracted users from several UK universities and is being piloted with students in Glasgow.
We developed the second platform, StrataResearch, to help students strengthen their critical appraisal skills independently using established methodological frameworks. Together, these platforms represent our attempt to build a more connected research ecosystem for medical students, linking learning, opportunity and career development.
For me, this project highlights a broader shift in medical education. As learners, we should not simply be consumers of educational programmes. We can also be partners in designing them.
By combining evaluation, student insight and digital innovation, we showed how a relatively simple educational intervention could generate wider change. What began as a journal club evolved into a scalable model for strengthening research culture, improving access to opportunities and supporting aspiring clinician researchers.
At a time when healthcare depends on clinicians who can confidently interpret evidence and contribute to advancing knowledge, supporting engagement with research from the earliest stages of training has never been more important. Our work in this space offers a practical example of how student-led innovation can help bridge that gap, creating new pathways for future doctors to engage with research, develop academic skills and shape the future of medicine.
Ben Macfarlane
Medical student
