Osteopathic emergency medicine programs infrequently publish in high-impact emergency medicine journals

Both the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) require core faculty to engage in scholarly work, including publication in peer-reviewed journals. With the ACGME/AOA merger, we sought to evaluate the frequency of publication in high-impact peer-reviewed EM journals from authors affiliated with osteopathic emergency medicine (EM) programs.

We performed a retrospective literature review using the Journal Citation Report database and identified the top five journals in the category of 'Emergency Medicine' by their 2011 Impact Factor. We examined all publications from each journal for 2011. For each article we recorded article type, authors' names, position of authorship (first, senior or other), the author's degree and affiliated institution. We present the data in raw numbers and percentages.

The 2011 EM journals with the highest impact factor were the following: Annals of Emergency Medicine, Resuscitation, Journal of Trauma, Injury, and Academic Emergency Medicine. Of the 9,298 authors published in these journals in 2011; 1,309 (15%) claimed affiliation with U.S.-based EM programs, of which 16 (1%) listed their affiliations with eight different osteopathic EM programs. The 16 authors claimed affiliation with 8 of 46 osteopathic EM programs (17%), while 1,301 authors claimed affiliation with 104 of 148 (70%) U.S.-based allopathic programs.

Authors from osteopathic EM programs are under-represented in the top EM journals. With the pending ACGME/AOA merger, there is a significant opportunity for improvement in the rate of publication of osteopathic EM programs in top tier EM journals.