Tracking medical resident publications: Insights for library services and graduate medical education support

OBJECTIVES: To support resident scholarship, we analyzed resident publication patterns at our institution. In this study, we refined our 2022-23 methodology to incorporate new questions and learnings from the initial analysis.

METHODS: We used a cross-sectional study design identifying residents with ≥3 years at our medical school who completed training between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019. Names were searched in two databases, Scopus and PubMed. If publications were published from one year after the trainee start date to 18 months after the trainee termination date, they were included in our analysis. Blinded reviewers independently assigned study types to each publication, with disagreements resolved by a third reviewer or by consensus.

RESULTS: Among 219 residents, 41% had at least one publication. Of those publications, 68% were categorized into five publication types: cohort, case report, narrative review, case series, and perspective/viewpoint. Nearly 1/3 of the 90 residents published their first article between 12 and and 25 months.

CONCLUSIONS: Librarians at our medical school can use this data to target publishing education and awareness based on time-in-residency and department. We have developed and refined a methodology that can be applied to future cohorts, enabling longitudinal tracking of scholarly productivity.