Characterization of the research papers of U.S. medical schools

An investigation of the relationship between National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and the quantity and nature of biomedical publications is reported for 120 U.S. medical school complexes. A correlation of 0.95 was found between the amount of NIH funds received and the number of biomedical publications from the medical schools. Medical school ranks based on bibliometric measures were found to correlate at the 0.80-0.90 level with ranks based on peer assessments of the schools. The characteristics of the medical school papers varied with the type of school. The average citation influence per paper increased with the publication size of the schools. This was true even when factors such as public versus private control, geographic region, average research level (from basic to clinical), and subject emphasis were controlled. The positive relationship between number of papers from a school and its citation influence holds within individual research levels and within subfields.