[On the way to becoming an MD (Dr. med.): What kind of support do doctoral students need? Part 2: Establishing the...

The poor quality of medical dissertations has repeatedly been criticized by scientific and higher education institutions. In medicine, doctoral students rated their own knowledge of fundamental scientific issues as low. The establishment of a doctoral research program could solve this problem. However, no scientific paper has yet been published showing how such support programs should be designed. Here we present an example of such a design on the basis of the doctoral research program which the Faculty of Medicine at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, established in 2011. Using requirements analyses, eight basic courses have been developed that can be attended separately but are considered to contain essential information for all doctorates. To ensure a high quality of the doctoral research program and to take into account the needs of doctoral students, both the individual courses and the doctoral research program as a whole were evaluated. The doctoral research program has been very well accepted by doctoral students, with a total of 449 doctoral students, who attended an average of five courses from 2011 to 2014. The total number of participants amounted to 2,302 in 159 courses. The results of the evaluation show that on average all the basic courses were considered to be 'good' or 'very good'. After participating in eight courses, the doctoral students' overall evaluation of the doctoral research program resulted in a very positive assessment of the overall concept. Further aspects, such as the examination of the impact of participation in the doctoral research program on dissertation quality, are pending. Due to the positive feedback from participants, we recommend that other faculties establish similar programs.