On Track to Professorship? A Bibliometric Analysis of Early Scholarly Output

Academic productivity, demonstrated by a record of scholarly publication, is the main criterion for academic promotion. Nevertheless, there are no data on early-career productivity milestones to guide young faculty members aspiring to attain professor status. We performed a bibliometric analysis to determine the number of scholarly papers published by current professors of orthopedic surgery within 5 years after their having acquired American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery certification (termed early scholarly output). Median early scholarly output for all professors (N = 108) was 11 publications. We found medians of 5 first-author and 2 last-author publications, and 4 publications in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research or Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Median number of papers cited at least 50 times by year 5 was 2. The median number of total citations was 29.5, and median Hirsch index (h-index) was 3. Faculty who were clinical professors published fewer papers and acquired fewer citations than faculty who were promoted but did have the clinical descriptor. Professors certified after 1995 were more productive than those certified before 1990. This descriptive study provided benchmark data on early scholarly productivity of current professors of orthopedic surgery and demonstrated this benchmark has risen in more recent years.