Table 1. Summary of results on fellows’ and mentors’ perspective for theme 1 that corresponds to the description of the current non-formal training program from motives to recruitment process to outcomes.

Sub-theme	Fellows’ perspective	Mentors’ perspective
Fellows’ motives: personal and academic	Personal Buying time to sit for an exam “I get some time into some exams” (FG1.P3) An opportunity when all other options failed “to apply for the residency, for the match so I’m also—like I knew that I would take one or two gap years” (FG2.P1) Academic Learning more about own specialty “You also learn a lot more if you’re interested in a specific field, you get greater insight about it, you have more time to do a lot of literature reviews and you kind of learn a lot from it as well” (FG1.P3) Publications “Research sounded like a good opportunity to get some papers published, maybe enhance the CV” (FG2.P2)	-
Unstandardized and selective recruitment process	Word of mouth and network “First of all, somebody has to have an interest in the topic. Then do—go on doctor-doctor basis to find out if they’re providing any research experience. This is usually the connections that you make or by word of mouth; Also, networking with previous generations that have worked with researchers before helps in that scenario” (FG1.P4) AUB graduates are at an advantage “The attending already knows about your background, about your medical degree” (FG1.P4) “I noticed it after—after I took the SHARP course, a lot of emails started pouring in from attendings” (FG1.P5)	Word of mouth and network “a lot of …[was] word of mouth (M1) “Interview is very very crucial, and the CV too, and the letter of recommendation, and it’s better to talk to the people who recommended [her], because most people get shy when they write a letter of recommendation, but when you call them on the phone, it’s much better, they will tell you honestly if they are good or not” (M3)
Unspecific terms of engagement	Unspecific contract “One thing that I think is important is that when I first applied for a research position and I signed my contract I realized that my contract was…… an e-mail practically speaking, that said “this PI wants to have you as a research fellow… And I expected a contract to read…” (P5) Unable to negotiate “It wasn’t really negotiated. Because I didn’t know that you can actually say that to the attending because you know you’re making me work on this even though it’s not my project, if I’m working for several weeks on it” (P3) Advantages: time flexibility “The benefit of this [unspecific contract] is that during this year a lot of us after we apply for a match have to take a long vacations [sic] to go for interviews, we need to…” (P4) Advantages: room for negotiation “One of the things I negotiated with my PI when I first started was—I asked him that I wanted clinical experience in this research position. And I wanted to see patients because I knew that was important.. he proposed my helping the ED physicians by giving shifts on weekly basis, so I did part time research during the week and a shift or two during the week as well, and that would be included in my time. It’s part of the program but I think it filled a need for both him and for me” (P5)	-
Met and unmet expectations	Expectations Interest in conducting research “Would be involved in research from a to z. Thinking about your own research, planning that out, having good guidance, writing it up, doing the data collection if it’s necessary, doing the research beforehand, write-up submission, review, and ultimately the aim is to publish… and, to be confident to be doing—to be able to do it by yourself…” (FG1.P4) Guidance from mentor “You need guidance of the mentor, they know what’s—they know the field, specialty, what kind of research is to be made.. We go out of med school we barely know anything about [research] what new can be added to the literature etc..” (FG2.P2) Working within specialty “When I took this position and some of it included picking up on projects that have already started and starting my own project but it was already clear from the beginning that even if I want to start my own projects they were going to have to be under a certain topic or a subject that the PI is interested in or [pause] works in” (FG1.P3) Met expectations Satisfied with the experience “I definitely, I did learn a lot about that part of the research, like you know, the data collection…the field work type. I think, I did gain a lot of skills, especially in terms of like coordinating, you know, a project at this level, you know, communication skills, definitely I would’ve liked to learn more in terms of—especially data analysis that side I feel—which I could still learn in the coming year hopefully” (FG2.P1) Benefits working on several projects “Which was a good contrast because I got the best of both worlds in a sense where, you know, whether I worked on a huge project that needed years of research and then I also worked on short term projects which I could call my own” (FG1.P4) Mentor-mentee relationship satisfaction “When it comes to research, she [PI] knows everything.. she knows how to direct you and if there’s any—we have questions, she knows the whole like—what’s being done everywhere… so she can tell you “oh they’re doing this, that thing” or that kind of thing. Yeah, so she’s very helpful, she’ll sometimes send like articles like we should think about doing this, and like we just came—she came back from a conference and she said “this is what they’re doing, maybe we could do something like that” (P2) “We have weekly meetings that are set every week, we’re communicating like every day via e-mail or phone or whatever. On the contrary, we are on the same page about what’s going on which is great. Sometimes there’s a bit of micromanaging on his [PI] part but I guess each one has his own style. . .” (FG2.P1) Teamwork “I think research is like a ladder of process, you need to help others and you need others to help you, you can’t do it all by yourself, so yeah” (P2) Unmet expectations Process of allocation to projects and large number of projects “I would prefer, like she said, to work on two or three projects rather than on many projects” (FG1.P5) “I started many different projects, maybe ten if not fifteen like fifteen different projects and at different points in time I found out that this’s probably not feasible, not doable and out of trial and error I learned what was good and what was not. I didn’t expect that” (FG1.P4) Unable to do own project “At the end, you don’t feel you achieved something, even though you did put a lot of work on the project, but you feel like at the end, you didn’t get any credit basically, or you know, that was the main thing that was frustrating for me, in terms of productivity and outcomes what do I have to show for myself at the end of the year” (P1) Working on unrelated research tasks “I had to do it once and then the second time honestly I, I kinda [sic] refused because I didn’t feel that I could—it’s for example screenshotting a lecture from a video or—to prepare something (FG1.P2); It’s like a secretary, “book a ticket” or something” (FG1.P2), or “proctor for exams for just within like the department so they feel like they were personal assistants so” (FG1.P5) Transparency in authorship allocation “Authorship tends to change a lot which isn’t something that should be happening but like towards the end when you’re, you know, when you’re almost done with the project you start to see like—the order starts changing based on what the PI thinks” (FG1.P5) Overall disappointment “A lot of time consuming projects and [pause] no credit, no recognition, and this is something that—not about being not recognized but something that I don’t think I should’ve been involved in from the beginning, you know” (FG1.P3) Mentoring Not enough time with the mentor “more communication.. more time—more one on one time. I think the whole year, we had like seven hours of—or seven days let’s say of one on one time.. Otherwise all by e-mail communication” (FG2.P2) Hierarchical relationship The workload is heavy “The attending would underestimate how much time a specific task, a certain task would take and then so for example I wanna work on a specific project and I think it’s the most valuable one and it’s the most time consuming. And then they would keep on sending me other tasks to do, for example review another—a paper that wasn’t published in the past or a few other tasks” (FG1.P2) Organizational Delayed contracts, delayed email account and payments “I was first paid in the middle of the third month” (FG2.P2) “It was annoying because you don’t get access, to privileges that you don’t get…we have to like call IT to get temporary accounts just to be able to log in.. I remember the first month I was using the account of my predecessor, and there was a bit of a mess, because sometimes—at some point I even lost some data because his account expired and mine hasn’t started so had to get IT to luckily recover the data. It was a bit of a mess the first few months finally I got my own account. So that transition period was a bit…” (FG2.P1) Limited funding to hire assistant staff Lack of training on softwares and administrative tasks	Expectations Interest in conducting research Fellows to be available Applying ethical considerations Unmet expectations Some fellows’ primary motive was not research “Most of them are doing it so they don’t waste a year, at the same time they want to prepare for their steps and they want to strengthen their CV” (M5) Availability “I think the main challenge would be the availability time” (M4) Residency interrupted their fellowship “The biggest problem is that they’re—already it takes them so long to get oriented and caught up and then they go for an interview for a month in the middle of it, and then they need to wrap up and leave early because they’ve matched somewhere” (M1) Mentoring Clinical workload “Clinicians, when we kind of work for our income, so we don’t really have time dedicated to research, set up big projects” (M6) Not enough experience in leading research project Not passionate about research, did it for promotion’s sake Organizational Little coordination between departments Lack of funding strongly impacted research fellows’ recruitment, and other research staff
Research Fellowship Outcomes	Hands-on experience on research “The more I talk to research fellows, I am discovering new things..—For example, I use Endnote, other people use other referencing frameworks…it wasn’t just referencing, when it comes to analysis, some people like use books or—just to freshen up on the material” (FG1.P5) Networking “Also I really appreciate.. Whenever I write a paper, I send it to friends to reread it, just for basic review. . . Making connections with other research fellows, sometimes you can just find somebody else just to read your paper just for medical comparison” (FG1.P4) Publications	Large variability in productivity depending on individual fellow “And so the productivity of the research fellow has been quite variable depending on how aggressive they are and how eager they are to, you know, participate in more than one project and succeed in finishing the projects” (M 7)

Abbreviations: AUB: American University of Beirut; ED: Emergency department; IT: Information technology; SHARP: Scholars in Health Research