1.Steps before starting your research journey:

Choose a broad area in your discipline (Ophthalmology) that fascinates you.

• Medical rather than surgical disciplines offer more research opportunities.
• Know that inflammations of the uvea and retinal diseases offer immense opportunities for interdisciplinary research.
• Get cross-disciplinary training to gain insight into disease epidemiology, etiopathogenesis, and management. Dr J.D.M. Gass, the father of the modern medical retina, and Prof Narsing Rao trained in pathology and ophthalmology. Likewise, Dr. Jim Rosenbaum trained in rheumatology and immunology and did pioneering research in uveitis. Drs. Robert Nussenblatt and Manabu Mochizuki were trained in both immunology and ophthalmology. Drs. John Kempen and Emmett Cunningham were trained in public health and ophthalmology. Many other researchers like them who trained in more than one discipline also became world leaders in their respective fields.
• Attend a course in research methodology.
• Choose a mentor to help you gain insight and navigate the complexities of research.¹ The mentors should be people with strong fundamental knowledge and experience and well-known and respected researchers. They should be available and guide you without any selfish motive. You must not be intimidated by them and be able to communicate without fear of rebuke or ridicule.

2. Steps before raising a research question:

• Be mindful in the clinic. The clinic is the best place to generate research ideas that will immediately apply in clinical sciences. You must be a keen observer to appreciate the nuances of the disease presentation, extraocular signs, labs, course and response to treatment. You must not be biased or prejudiced in what you observe. Use valid tools to document all observations at all patient follow-through stages. You must hone your skills to recognise even minor differences between what is known and what is unknown.
• Create a database of your patients. Encourage the patients to follow up
• Never fabricate data or plagiarise.² Know that others will replicate your data; if you have been honest, they will resonate with your observations.
• When in doubt, seek the help of mentors to resolve conflicting observations from what is known. Peer group research meetings and conferences are a great touchstone to test your original observations and hypotheses.
• Seek collaborations with your peer group and/or interdisciplinary researchers in your institute or elsewhere. Collaborate only with people who are known for their academic integrity and honesty. Consider whether your collaborators provide you with full access to the shared data.

3. Before framing a research question

• Before starting to write your research, do an extensive literature review and find the gaps in current knowledge your paper will aim to fill. Know that most research in the medical field is incremental. Your paper is likely a tiny step in that endeavour. Breakthroughs in medicine are few and far between, and fewer still are serendipitous.
• Subscribe to the free ‘Table of Contents’ of several multispecialty journals, including NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Nature, Science, etc., and all the Ophthalmology journals. The abstracts are free to all. This will keep you abreast of the hot topics in medical research. Many articles are open-access or available through full-access library services, such as Open Athens or HINARI. Authors are happy to share their papers, if requested, in their email. Know that authors/editors of books/chapters are highly reluctant to share the whole chapter.
• Do not directly download the article PDF. Go to the journal portal and locate the paper of interest in the table of contents; click on the Full-text HTML option. In the right-side column, you will find the article's metrics to show how much interest the article has generated in social media and who the article's readers are across the globe. It helps you gain insight into what topics attract the readers' attention. Once done, you can download the PDF of the article for your future use.

4. Framing a research question

• Keep your research question short and simple.
• The research question must be ethical, feasible, novel, engaging, and relevant.
• Your research must add to the knowledge base and improve patient outcomes

5. Choose a standard format for writing your study protocol/paper

Clearly define the type of study, the purpose, the population, the intervention, the comparator/control, the outcome and the time of study.

The type of your study may be

• A single case report
• A short case-series
• A prospective cohort (a group of individuals) who are followed over time to observe outcomes related to specific exposures. Data is collected as events unfold, allowing researchers to track the development of the outcome of interest before it occurs. This design helps establish a temporal relationship between exposure and outcome, making it easier to suggest causality. For example, a prospective study of smokers will be conducted to determine how many will develop lung cancer.
• A retrospective cohort study is a study of an existing database of uncommon or rare diseases collected over time to study the exposure of factors before the outcome of interest. For example, an analysis of lung cancer patients to find out how many smokers versus non-smokers developed lung cancer.
• Observational studies on patients without any intervention (usually, they form a control group in interventional research)
• Randomized controlled trials (Interventional, mostly multicentric), Review articles, Systematic Reviews (Synthesis of knowledge by reviewing data from multiple studies selected based on pre-defined strict selection criteria) and Meta-analysis ( statistical analyses combining several similar studies) are usually authored by experienced researchers.

6. Writing the manuscript

• Start by writing your Methods first. Writing what you have done is the easiest part, as you have done it yourself. Be as detailed as possible so that anyone else who wishes to duplicate your work can do it. Describe the statistical methods used.
• The next step is writing your Observations. Be specific in what you found. Use a minimum number of tables, figures, etc., to illustrate your observations. Use professional statisticians' help to describe the statistical significance of your observations.
• The third step is writing a Discussion. Essentially, you need to discuss the significance of what you found in light of the previous knowledge on the subject. If you make a novel observation, you must justify your hypothesis. Avoid unnecessary review of literature if it is not pertinent to your study. All previous works, except the most fundamental common knowledge cited in your paper, must be referenced. Interestingly, this paper segment draws the least attention from the reviewers, who often insist on trimming the discussion and keeping it relevant to your research question.
• The fourth step in writing your manuscript is the Introduction. In this short paragraph, you must justify why you carried out the study, what were the gaps in the existing knowledge and only a very brief review of the most relevant literature. Remember, primarily based on this segment, your paper will likely be accepted or rejected.
• The title and the abstract or summary of the paper are the most critical parts of your manuscript and should be written at the end. Most journals have a word limit. You must be very brief in conveying why you did the study, what was done, what was found, and what it means. Readers have free access to the abstract, which must entice them to read the entire paper.³
• The pattern of the references must follow the instructions in the journal's author section. AI-generated references are often wrong. Use PubMed or other reference tools to generate the correct and complete reference list.
• For us Indians, English is not our mother tongue; hence, even the most experienced of us make grammatical errors that confuse the reviewers/editors, often resulting in the manuscript's summary dismissal. Either take the help of a professional English language editor (Many journals offer this facility against payment. You need to disclose if this is the case!) or use online language editors to correct the grammar.
• Never use the Large Language Model (AI tools) to write any segment of your paper. Not only can the editors/reviewers spot these quickly, but you may also be accused of unintended plagiarism. Many journals ask for a disclosure.^4,5

7. Choosing the appropriate journal

Be aware of predatory journals-they abound in today’s world. Often, these journals have similar-sounding names and claim to have reputed researchers as editors /co-editors, often without their consent. When in doubt, confirm by dropping an email to the listed editorial board member/s. It can be challenging to tell them apart from genuine open-access journals, as both charge article processing fees. Genuine journals do not solicit articles and do not assure you of publication within days of submission. Unlike genuine science journals, predatory journals do not keep an archive of the published articles. Predatory journals, while claiming to get your manuscript peer-reviewed, never do so. This is not the case with genuine journals.

The acceptance rate of high-impact journals ranges from 5-10%. Do not be discouraged by the rejection slips. Even the Nobel laureates have had their papers rejected. The reviewers' comments sent with the rejection letter are extremely valuable and can help you improve your manuscript, which you can send to another journal.

8. Your paper has been published; is that all?

Once published, you must track your paper from time to time to see if your paper got any readers/viewers (see 3c above) or media attention. More importantly, you must know if your work got cited. Scopus and Google Scholar are two standard search engines that track citations of your work. Remember, if a published paper was neither read nor ever cited, you might as well have thrown it in the trash bin. It helps you to know what of your research papers got maximum visibility in terms of citations. You should focus your future research on these areas.

9. Keep your research focused on a narrow field

As a young researcher, especially when seeking promotions to the next level, it is very tempting to ask senior faculty members across subspecialties if you could write a paper based on their data. Most happily oblige.⁶ Only later in life, it may dawn upon you that your resume has been tainted by the papers written on diverse subjects. Choose a narrow field to make a mark as a serious researcher.

10. Make your research visible

Make your paper visible. Share links (including Pub Med ID, DOI, etc.) to your paper on social media, such as Twitter and WhatsApp; use the links as an email signature; contact your organisation’s public relations officer if it needs to be publicized for lay people. You may contact bloggers who write on medical topics or start your blog. Although expensive to publish, open-access articles fetch many more readers and citations. I suggest you share links or the PDF of your published work with key opinion leaders in your specialization.