A. Gasnick1, A. Badrinathan2, C. Boutros2, A. Bassiri2, J. Sinopoli2, C. W. Towe2 1Case Western Reserve University School Of Medicine, Cleveland, OH, USA 2University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Division Of Thoracic And Esophageal Surgery, Department Of Surgery, Cleveland, OH, USA
Introduction:
Research is crucial in academic medicine, contributing to career advancement, institutional reputation, and patient care. However, factors like temporal constraints, which can vary across specialties, and demographics can affect research productivity. This study aims to understand factors that can enhance research productivity by investigating correlations between surgeon research productivity and specialty, medical school attended, year of graduation, and gender.
Methods:
This study is a bibliometric analysis of publishing trends among providers who are actively practicing medicine in the United States. A list of physicians was obtained using data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), as well as their specialty of practice, medical school graduation and year, and gender. Physicians were excluded if their primary specialty was non-surgical or they had missing specialty information. The outcome of interest was the number of citations listed in MEDLINE database. The database was accessed using the Entrez programming utilities for Python 3 as provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A Python 3 environment was utilized to develop a “scraping” method to derive publication information for a given author’s name using the Entrez utility and MEDLINE parsing utility. This information was then imported into a pandas dataframe for further analysis. Providers were categorized by primary specialty as listed in the CMS database and duplicates were removed. The relationships of provider characteristics and citations were analyzed with linear regression.
Results:
Providers in the field of surgical oncology demonstrated an association with higher citation numbers than all other specialties considered (coeff 12.46,CI 4.77 – 20.15, p=0.002). Providers who attended medical schools that resulted in a MD degree, as opposed to DO, also demonstrated an association with higher citation numbers (coeff 16.16, CI 0.39 – 31.64, p=0.045). The number of years from medical school graduation to the timing of this study demonstrated a negative association, suggesting that younger providers are associated with higher citation numbers than their older counterparts (coeff -0.74, CI (-1.25, -0.22), p=0.005). Citation counts were similar among males and females.
Conclusion:
We show that surgical oncologists and younger physicians demonstrate higher research productivity. The competitive landscape of residency and fellowships and the increasingly competitive field of surgical oncology may contribute to these associations. Medical schools with robust research resources, particularly MD schools, may play a vital role in preparing providers for successful academic careers.
