Medical undergraduates' contributions to publication output of world's top universities in 2013

Medical undergraduates' (UGs) involvement in research activities is thought to be mutually beneficial to students, their mentors and the scholarly productivity of their universities. However, most evidence in favor of such assumption relies on subjective measures such as the self-reported gains in skills or knowledge rather than robust objective estimates for assessing impact.

We aimed to objectively track and describe publications with UG co-authors-their proportion to the total publication output of world's top universities, their characteristics and their potential impact on biomedical literature.

We contacted the corresponding authors of the 2013's Medline-indexed publications affiliated to world's top 10 universities to investigate if any of their co-authors was an UG. Articles with UG co-authors were further assessed to determine, along with other variables: the type of study design, field of the article, publishing journal and its impact factor (IF), and number of received citations.

Out of 25 152 publications, 2537 articles (10.1%) contained at least one UG co-author who was the first author in 635 papers (25%). Articles with UG co-authors were published in 1114 journals with a median IF of 3.661. Most UGs' co-authored publications (82.7%, n = 2098) were cited at least once within 1 year, for a median of three citations per article.

UGs contributed to one in every 10 publications affiliated to top universities. Their papers were published in journals with good IFs and received a fair number of citations, which would reflect the relatively good quality and impact of these articles.