Predictors of academic productivity in emergency medicine

Emergency medicine (EM), as a young specialty, has few measures of academic productivity beyond the traditional National Institutes of Medicine ranking, which is not applicable to most academic EM programs. This study was undertaken to identify factors associated with number of publications per academic institution in an attempt to predict keys to success.

Retrospective study for a seven-year period using a MEDLINE search with Emergency in the Institution field. All publications were included except Letters and Abstracts: The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) website was queried for program descriptors that were analyzed as independent predictors of publication success. A multivariate predictive model was constructed to evaluate the independent variables found to be significant univariate modifiers.

Although total emergency department census, postgraduate years, fellowship opportunities, residency research requirement, hospital census, the year the program was established, and SAEM region were not associated with increased publications, faculty size and program location (region) were statistically associated with increased publications. The Western United States had the highest number of total publications per program (mean 39.6 [95% confidence interval = 25.8 to 53.5]). Faculty size was an independent predictor of publication, with each additional faculty member adding 0.58 publications for the entire seven-year period under review. No other demographic descriptors were significantly associated with publications.

Only program location and faculty size were associated with the number of publications for a specific institution. Factors such as patient care load did not seem to influence such productivity.