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. 2020 May:137:e291-e297.
doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2020.01.173. Epub 2020 Jan 31.

Preresidency Publication Productivity of U.S. Neurosurgery Interns

Phan Q Duy  1 , Manish D Paranjpe  2 , Prince Antwi  3 , Nicholas S Diab  4 , Jason K Wang  5 , David Nam-Woo Kim  4 , Alexander M Moushey  4 , Wyatt B David  4 , Kush Kapadia  6 , Ank A Agarwal  6 , Jinny Huang  7 , Amar H Sheth  4 , Kedous Mekbib  4 , H Alexander Chen  4 , Serban Negoita  8 , Fuchen Liu  4 , Yutaka Takeo  4 , Ishan Paranjpe  9 , Sayan Manna  9 , Sumarth K Mehta  4 , Jason L Gerrard  4
Affiliations

Preresidency Publication Productivity of U.S. Neurosurgery Interns

Phan Q Duy et al. World Neurosurg. 2020 May.

Abstract

Background: Research experience is believed to be an important component of the neurosurgery residency application process. One measure of research productivity is publication volume. The preresidency publication volume of U.S. neurosurgery interns and any potential association between applicant publication volume and the match results of top-ranked residency programs have not been well characterized.

Objective: In this study, we sought to characterize the preresidency publication volume of U.S. neurosurgery residents in the 2018-2019 intern class using the Scopus database.

Methods: For each intern, we recorded the total number of publications, total number of first or last author publications, total number of neuroscience-related publications, mean number of citations per publication, and mean impact factor of the journal per publication. Preresidency publication volumes of interns at the top-25 programs (based on a composite ranking score according to 4 different ranking metrics) were compared with those at all other programs.

Results: We found that 82% of neurosurgery interns included in the analysis (190 interns from 95 programs) had at least 1 publication. The average number of publications per intern among all programs was 6 ± 0.63 (mean ± standard error of the mean). We also found that interns at top-25 neurosurgery residency programs tended to have a higher number of publications (8.3 ± 1.2 vs. 4.8 ± 0.7, P = 0.0137), number of neuroscience-related publications (6.8 ± 1.1 vs. 4.1 ± 0.7, P = 0.0419), and mean number of citations per publication (9.8 ± 1.7 vs. 5.7 ± 0.8, P = 0.0267) compared with interns at all other programs.

Conclusions: Our results provide a general estimate of the preresidency publication volume of U.S. neurosurgery interns and suggest a potential association between publication volume and matching in the top-25 neurosurgery residency programs.

Keywords: Medical education; Neurosurgery; Publications; Residency; Surgery.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosure: The authors do not report any personal or institutional financial interest.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Publication volume of interns in top-25 neurosurgery residency programs and those in all other programs. A) Total number of publications per intern. B) Total number of first- or last-author publications per intern. C) Total number of neuroscience-related publications per intern. *P<0.05, ns denotes P>0.05. Statistical significance was determined by a Welch two-sample t test. Mean ± SEM are shown by the graphs.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Publication impact of interns in top-25 neurosurgery residency programs and those in all other programs. A) Mean number of citations per publication per intern. B) Mean impact factor per publication per intern. *P<0.05, ns denotes P>0.05. Statistical significance was determined by a Welch two-sample t test. Mean ± SEM are shown by the graphs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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