Abstract
Research participation has been increasingly emphasized in undergraduate medical education, but limited data are available to help students formulate realistic and attainable goals for scholarly productivity. This study provides an objective, all-specialty, nationally representative estimate of PubMed-indexed publications among the 2022 cohort of new interns in the USA, representing their scholarly productivity during medical school. Only 39% of interns included in the analysis had any publications during medical school, and mean number of publications (1.4 ± 3.9) was well below the mean self-reported total of abstracts, presentations, and publications attributed to the same cohort based on residency application data (7.9).
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Data Availability
Source data are publicly accessible and replication code is available from the author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Ms. Samantha Mannarino for assistance with data collection and Dr. Lisa Moreno-Walton for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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The author discloses salary support through research and quality improvement grants from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust and Lilly and Co., Inc., which are unrelated to the present work. The author has no other relevant financial or non-financial interests or competing interests to declare.
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Appendices
Appendix 1. Database Search Strategy and Validation
This study defined residents as health care providers with a Type 1 (individual provider) National Provider Identifier (NPI) in the NPPES database, a MD or DO degree listed, and a primary or secondary NPI provider taxonomy code of 390200000X (“students in an organized healthcare or training program,” a code which includes resident physicians who have not yet been licensed by a state board of medicine). NPI numbers are unique to each health care provider and issued only once. Therefore, the sample was limited to resident physicians with a NPI enumeration date between the first day after the military Match and the last day before new residents begin work in the US (i.e., 9 December 2021 to 30 June 2022), and the remaining sample was considered to represent only interns.
Relative to the 2022 cohort of matched graduating medical students from the author’s institution (N=84), this search strategy successfully identified the corresponding NPI number for 53 interns (63%). In this cohort, the most common reasons for not having an eligible NPPES registry record were absence of “MD” credential (18%) in the registry record, and absence of the student taxonomy code (13%).
To quantify potential misattribution of PubMed-indexed publications by other researchers with the same name as each intern, we manually reviewed a random subsample of 100 intern names before conducting the main search. A PubMed query using the parameters described above returned 97 results for 28 intern names. After conducting a Web search of public records to confirm author affiliations, we determined that 22 of 28 interns (79%) were correctly classified as having published at least one article during the study period, while 74 of 97 articles identified in our search (76%) were correctly attributed to one of the intern physicians in this cohort.
Appendix 2. Manual Search to Determine the Specialty of the 100 Interns with the Most Publications Attributed by the Study
The author manually searched the Web in February 2023 to determine the specialties of 100 profiles with the highest number of total publications. This manual review excluded 5 profiles of physicians who completed residency training abroad; 4 profiles of physicians in non-clinical research positions; 3 profiles appearing to represent attending physicians; 1 profile appearing to represent a current medical student; and 1 profile of an intern physician whose specialty could not be determined. The remaining 86 interns had between 20-134 publications (median: 29) attributed by the PubMed search strategy. This group included 69 men and 17 women; 78 MDs and 8 DOs; and 10 PhDs. The specialty distribution of the 86 interns is shown in the Table below.
Specialty | Number of residents |
|---|---|
Internal Medicine | 22 |
Neurological Surgery | 10 |
Orthopedic Surgery | 10 |
General Surgery | 9 |
Plastic Surgery | 7 |
Pediatrics | 5 |
Ophthalmology | 3 |
Transitional Year | 3 |
Urology | 3 |
Dermatology | 2 |
Neurology | 2 |
Otolaryngology | 2 |
Preliminary Year (not otherwise specified) | 2 |
Anesthesiology | 1 |
Diagnostic Radiology | 1 |
Emergency Medicine | 1 |
Family Medicine | 1 |
Pathology | 1 |
Psychiatry | 1 |
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Tumin, D. Nationwide Analysis of Medical Student Publications upon Entry into Residency. Med.Sci.Educ. 34, 31–35 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-023-01920-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-023-01920-x