Virtual medical research mentoring

Medical research is important for professional advancement, and mentoring is a key means by which students and early‐career doctors can engage in research. Contrasting international research collaborations, research mentoring programmes are often geographically limited. As the COVID‐19 pandemic has led to increased use of online technology for classes and conferences, a virtual, international approach to medical research mentoring may be valuable.


Funding information
No funding was acquired for this study.
Evaluation: With 63 active members from 14 different countries, the Group has been successful in training medical students and early-career medical graduates in academic medicine. Our members have led over 100 peer-reviewed publications of original research and reviews since 2015, winning 13 research prizes during this time.
Implications: Our accessible-distributed model of virtual international medical research collaboration and multi-level mentoring is viable and efficient and caters to the needs of contemporary healthcare. Others should consider building similar models to improve medical research mentoring globally.

| BACKGROUND
International medical research collaboration has become prevalent, with an increasing interest in cultivating medical students' participation in medical research. 1 An important means for that is mentoring, defined as 'a special partnership between two people based on commitment to the mentoring process, common goals and expectations, focus, mutual trust and respect'. 2 Many medical schools have launched research mentorship programmes, with some having found positive impacts on students' career and personal development. 1,[3][4][5] However, unlike collaborative research, most mentoring programmes are limited to organisations/countries for resources and logistical reasons, 5,6 potentially representing a missed opportunity as international research exposure is beneficial for mentees. 4 Recent years have seen an increasing interest in virtual research mentorship, where mentoring occurs over the internet. 7-10 Although these efforts have demonstrated the feasibility of virtual research mentoring, most remained institution specific. Meanwhile, we believe that virtual research mentoring may help break the bounds of nationality and facilitate participation in international research, an idea already shown to be plausible in a small, highly structured cancer research programme. 11 The relevance of virtual research mentoring was further reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many in-person learning activities, including research mentoring, to switch to virtual settings. Therefore, we hereby present our experience with an accessible-distributed model of virtual international medical research collaboration and multi-level mentoring. Although we started in 2015 as a smaller group of researchers in Hong Kong, years of development have transformed the group into a semistructured international mentoring programme aimed at enhancing mentees' research skills and, hence, output. Whilst COVID-19 did not motivate the founding of our programme, we believe that COVID-19 has fundamentally changed medical education practices, with greater recognition of the potential and importance of virtual medical education. 11,12 Overall, we believe that our experience is ever more relevant to medical educators today, a belief that constituted the motivation for this article.
We hereby present our experience with an accessible-distributed model of virtual international medical research collaboration and multi-level mentoring. To maximise international participation, all mentoring and research activities were conducted on virtual platforms.

| Mentoring system
Our Group aims to provide mentees with first-hand experience of all aspects of academic medicine, from formulating research questions and designing studies to data analysis and communicating findings (Table 1). Whilst there is no fixed curriculum, we provide all Group members with self-help learning resources atop lectures and interactive discussions ( Table 2). These constitute the main means of learning alongside direct participation in research projects. We encourage all Group members, however junior, to lead their own projects and be involved in all phases of research including the publication process.
Members often lead multiple projects simultaneously. These allow mentees to have a solid, hands-on experience with real-life academic medicine. To best support our mentees, we utilise a multi-level mentoring system, in which peer mentoring occurs atop mentoring of junior members by principal investigators and established academics. Senior mentees, mostly early-career graduates or senior medical students, guide junior mentees in their research projects. As junior mentees mature and gain more experience, they gradually become peer mentors, through which they also learn to mentor. This creates a sustainable system that allows closer support and reduces hierarchy. Peer mentoring occurs atop mentoring of junior members by principal investigators and established academics.  Conceptualization; data curation; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; supervision; writing-review and editing.