Staying on top of the literature, finding research
opportunities, and never again discovering a deadline in the past tense.
Robert Chen, MD, PhD and
Lynn Ren, MD, PhD
Research Chiefs, UW Psychiatry | 20 August 2026
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Before anything else
This deck was built with an AI. Here is exactly what that means.
What Claude did
Assembled these slides, drafted the lab summaries from each unit's
public website, gathered and formatted every link, and wrote the calendar you'll
see later.
What was checked
Every link opened by hand. Every PubMed number on the next slide
run live against NCBI today: measured, not estimated. Conference dates put
through five independent verification rounds.
What may still be wrong
Lab descriptions were not confirmed with the PIs. 79 of 223
conference dates are projections from past cycles, not announcements. An AI can
be confidently, fluently wrong.
Everything here is a starting point, not a citation.
Each item links to its primary source. Before a deadline matters to you, open the link.
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The first problem
You cannot read it all. Here is the actual arithmetic.
Measured against PubMed on
20 August 2026, counting the trailing 365 days.
4,829
new records enter PubMed every day
324
of those are psychiatry-related, every day
57
appear each week across the 12 leading psychiatry journals
Fifty-seven a week is a reading list. Three hundred a day is a nervous breakdown.
The whole game is getting from the second number to the first.
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The second problem
And the papers are the easy part.
The field keeps moving
Guidelines get revised. Drugs get approved. The specialty argues
with itself about what it even is, and that argument doesn't appear in any
journal's table of contents.
The opportunities are invisible
Travel awards, abstract deadlines, fellowships, poster sessions.
None of it arrives in your inbox. You find out in November that the abstract was
due in September.
Nobody sends you that email. So today we build the things that do.
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Part one
Staying on top of the research
Four channels, ranked by how much they give you back
for the time they cost.
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The map
Four channels. They do different jobs.
Push: PubMed alerts
Tells you what came out. Complete, free, unranked by anyone's
taste but yours. This is the backbone.
Audio: podcasts
Tells you what it means clinically. Fits in the commute,
which is the only reason it actually happens.
Opinion: Substack
Tells you what to think about it, and who disagrees. This is
where the arguments about the field live.
Automated: scheduled LLM jobs
Tells you what you asked to be told, daily. Highest leverage,
highest error rate. Use with a hand on the brake.
Start with one. Start with the first one.
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Channel one
PubMed alerts are the highest-yield four minutes in this deck.
Set it up once, in residency, and it keeps working through
fellowship and faculty.
It is complete
No algorithm decides what you see. If the journal published it,
the alert contains it.
It is free, and it is yours
No paywall, no engagement optimisation, no feed. It arrives in
email and then it stops.
You choose the journals
Which means you are choosing your own reading list rather than
inheriting someone else's.
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Follow along · step one of four
Sign in, so PubMed has somewhere to put the alert.
Go to pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and click Log in, top right.
Sign in through your institution. Pick University of Washington
and use your NetID. You can also use Google or an NCBI account.
Once you're in, your username replaces the Log in button. Clicking it opens
Dashboard, which is where saved searches live.
The account menu, once you're signed in. Dashboard is the one you want.
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Follow along · step two of four
Paste this into the search box.
"JAMA Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"The American Journal of Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"The Lancet. Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"World Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"Molecular Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"Biological Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"Neuropsychopharmacology"[ta] OR
"Schizophrenia Bulletin"[ta] OR
"Psychological Medicine"[ta] OR
"The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry"[ta] OR
"BMJ Mental Health"[ta] OR
"Nature Mental Health"[ta]
What [ta] means
"Title abbreviation", meaning the journal field. PubMed accepts the
full title or the NLM abbreviation and resolves both to the same journal.
What this costs you
About 57 papers a week. Titles and abstracts only, so it
is roughly a five-minute skim.
Too much?
Keep only the first four journals plus BMJ Mental Health.
That lands at 12 a week and is a perfectly respectable place to start.
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Follow along · step three of four
Turn the search into a standing alert.
Run the search, then click Create alert. It sits directly
under the search box.
Name it something you'll recognise in an inbox. "Psychiatry, core
journals" beats "search 1". Up to 100 characters.
Set the schedule to Weekly. Daily is how people end up filtering these
straight to archive.
Set format to Abstract and max items to 50, then Save.
Abstracts let you triage without opening anything.
Schedule
daily · weekly · monthly
Format
Summary · Abstract · Summary text · Abstract text · PubMed
Items
1 · 5 · 10 · 20 · 50 · 100 · 200
Every one of these is changeable later,
so don't agonise. The only irreversible mistake is not making one.
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Follow along · step four of four
This is what you're building toward.
My NCBI → Dashboard → Saved Searches.
The "What's New" column
A live count of what has appeared since you last looked.
Click the number to open just those. Clicking it resets the counter.
Run as many as you like
One for your core journals, one for your own research topic, one
for a method you're learning. They cost nothing to keep.
Four minutes, once. Then it runs for the rest of your career.
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Channel two
Podcasts: the ones that survive contact with a real schedule.
The Carlat Psychiatry Podcast
Chris Aiken, MD & Kellie Newsome, PMHNP
Fifteen minutes, clinically concrete, no industry funding. Post-tests earn up to 30 CME a year. If you pick one, pick this.
thecarlatreport.com
Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast
David Puder, MD
Long-form and therapy-forward. Nearly 270 episodes, so treat the back catalogue as a reference shelf, not a queue.
psychiatrypodcast.com
NEI Podcast
Neuroscience Education Institute
Semimonthly, mechanism-heavy psychopharmacology with key opinion leaders. Good when you want the receptor-level story.
nei.global
Psychopharmacology Institute
Flavio Guzman, MD
Structured psychopharm teaching rather than news. A CME program more than a podcast; useful when you want depth on one drug class.
psychopharmacologyinstitute.com
PsychRounds
Drs. Tanner Hewitt, Larry Wang, Bradley Miller
Made by residents, for residents. Short, practical, pitched exactly at where you are rather than where an attending remembers being.
Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Psychiatry Boot Camp
Mark Mullen, MD
The fundamentals done properly: catatonia, capacity, agitation, risk. Built as intern prep; described in Academic Psychiatry.
psychiatrybootcamp.com
CME claims are the publishers' own. Check current accreditation before you count on the credit.
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Channel three
Substack: where the field argues with itself.
Psychiatry at the Margins
Awais Aftab, MD
The best single window into conceptual and critical psychiatry. Rigorous, generous to opponents, never cynical. Start here.
psychiatrymargins.com
Astral Codex Ten
Scott Alexander
A psychiatrist writing long-form on evidence, statistics and how to think. Not a psychiatry newsletter; often the sharpest thing about it.
astralcodexten.com
Rational Psychiatry
Thomas Reilly, MD
A monthly roundup of psychiatric research from an Oxford DPhil. If you want one email that tells you what mattered, this is it.
rationalpsychiatry.substack.com
Jonathan Shedler
Jonathan Shedler, PhD
Psychodynamic technique, written with a blade. Best read as a corrective when everything else you consume is a trial registry.
jonathanshedler.substack.com
Socratic Psychiatrist
Martin Greenwald, MD
Essayistic clinical reflection. Funnier than the others, and quietly serious about what the work does to the person doing it.
socraticpsychiatrist.substack.com
Make them a podcast
In the Substack app (not the website), tap the play icon at the
top of a post and it reads itself aloud. Most publications have it. That turns this
whole column into commute time.
English-language posts only
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Channel three and a half
The best discussions of papers happen here. On both sides.
Nowhere else do authors, critics and
methodologists argue about the same paper in public, within a day of it appearing.
None of that reaches you by default.
My view: worth it, as long as you know it is a standing cost
and not a one-time setup.
Tailoring the feed is the whole job
Untailored, this channel is worthless. A feed worth reading takes
days to weeks of following, muting and unfollowing, and there is no default
that works.
And it never finishes
Stay vigilant. Drop your guard and the ragebait floods back
in, because that is what the algorithm rewards once you stop correcting it.
Pay for the pro account
It costs money, and it buys no ads and a cleaner feed,
which is what makes the tailoring actually stick.
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Channel four
Have an assistant read the internet at 6:30 every morning.
My own scheduled jobs. Five running; 44 runs in the last 30 days.
What this is
A standing instruction to an AI assistant, on a timer. It searches,
summarises and emails you. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all do a version of this.
Why it earns its place
It covers what PubMed structurally cannot: preprints, FDA actions,
conference news, trial registrations, and the trade press.
The brake
It will hallucinate a citation eventually. Treat every output
as a pointer to check, never as a source to quote.
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Sixty seconds
Build one now.
Name it so you know what it is in six months.
Weekly, on a day you're not post-call.
Write the instruction like you'd brief a medical student. Say what you
want, what you don't, and how long.
Send it to email, so it lands where you already triage.
Every Thursday, summarise the past week in
psychiatry: new RCTs, guideline changes, and FDA
actions. Ten bullets, each with a working link to
the primary source. Say "nothing this week" rather
than padding. Flag anything you could not verify.
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If you remember nothing else
Do these three. Total cost: about seven minutes.
Set the PubMed alert
Weekly, abstract format, the twelve journals we just pasted.
Four minutes, once. It is the only channel here that is complete.
Put Carlat in your podcast app
Fifteen-minute episodes, clinically usable, free.
Two minutes. It survives call weeks, which is the whole test.
Subscribe to Psychiatry at the Margins
Awais Aftab, roughly weekly, free tier is plenty.
One minute. It is how you stay a thinking psychiatrist and not just an informed one.
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Over to you
What am I missing?
Every one of you has a source I don't. Newsletters,
journal clubs, a fellow who forwards the good stuff, a listserv nobody documented.
Say it now and it goes
on the resident page tonight.
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Intermission. Please do this now
Research Track Party at John Neumaier's house.
When
Saturday 19 September, 1:00 PM
Where
Shoreline, WA. Full address on the RSVP form
Host
Dr. John Neumaier
What
Food, drinks, science, and a real view of the Sound
Bring
Yourself, plus anyone you're bringing. The form asks
The form takes about thirty
seconds: are you coming, your year, who's with you, and any dietary restrictions.
RSVP now
Point your camera at this. forms.gle/QDTBfVnR295zDA7F6
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Part two
Conferences, deadlines, and where to present
The part nobody hands you, and the part that costs a
whole year when you miss it.
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The thing I built for this
A residency research calendar. Public, free, no account.
individual dates on the timeline, out to the end of residency
138
confirmed against the organisation's own page, each with a link
Filters by your PGY year, subspecialty and
research interests. Exports to your calendar. Runs entirely in your browser, so
nothing you type leaves your machine.
Open it now
We're going through it together. therealryc.github.io/ residency-research-calendar
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Follow along · live demo
Five minutes to make it yours.
Open the link. A short wizard asks your PGY year, subspecialty interests
and research areas. You can skip it, and skipping shows you everything.
Watch the timeline filter. Ineligible opportunities drop away as you
answer. Nothing is hidden permanently; you can always show everything again.
Click any bar to open the detail panel: eligibility, cost band, notes,
and the link to the organisation's own page.
Export to your calendar. Choose which categories to include, then
download an .ics and open it in Outlook or Google Calendar.
Where your profile lives
In your browser, on your machine. No account, no server, no email
collected. Export a file if you want it on another computer.
Something missing?
Add your own deadline in the app, or open an issue on the repo.
Winter Brain got added because someone asked.
github.com/therealRYC/residency-research-calendar
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The important slide
How much to trust any given date.
Confirmed 138 dates
Read off the organisation's own page, with the link and the date
it was checked. Solid.
Projected 79 dates
Next cycle isn't announced. This is last year's date rolled
forward. Useful for planning, never for relying on.
Unconfirmed 6 dates
Something is there but we could not verify it. Shown so you know
to look, flagged so you don't trust it.
Every single entry links to its source
That is the point of the whole thing. You should never have to
take my word, or an AI's word, for a date that costs you a year.
Five verification rounds found a fabricated award, a deadline off by 71 days,
and four stale cycles. Assume there is a sixth.
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Finding a mentor
44 psychiatry-related labs and centers at UW, in one page.
Compiled by
Lynn Ren, MD, PhD, your other Research Chief. Search by disorder, method or
name; filter by research type; click straight through to the lab.
44
labs, centers and programs
25
home units across UW
10
research-type filters
Descriptions were AI-drafted
from each unit's public site and are not confirmed with the investigators. Directors
change. Open the lab page before you email anyone.
Browse the labs
Public, no login, works offline once open. therealryc.github.io/ uw-psychiatry-labs
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Everything from today
Three links. They all live on the resident page.
The calendar
96 opportunities, 223 dates, every one linked to its source.
therealryc.github.io/ residency-research-calendar
The labs browser
44 UW labs and centers, searchable. Compiled by Lynn Ren, MD, PhD.
therealryc.github.io/ uw-psychiatry-labs
The RSVP
Research Track Party, Saturday 19 September, 1:00 PM.
forms.gle/QDTBfVnR295zDA7F6
Set the alert before you leave the room. Everything else is optional.
