Endangered academia: preserving the pediatric surgeon scientist

Pediatric surgery is one of the most difficult surgical fellowships to obtain. It requires stellar academic credentials and, often, dedicated time pursuing research. It is unknown, however, if pediatric surgeons maintain high academic output as faculty members. We hypothesized that the majority of pediatric surgeons do not pursue robust research activities as faculty, and therefore, over time, their academic productivity decreases.

Numbers of publications, citations, H-index, and NIH funding rates were determined for 4354 surgical faculty at the top-55 NIH based departments of surgery using websites, Scopus, NIH RePORTER, and Grantome. Continuous variables were compared with ANOVA and post-hoc Bonferroni; categorical variables by χ² test. p<0.05 was significant.

In this dataset, 321 pediatric surgery (PS) faculty represented 7.4% of the cohort. Among PS faculty, 31% were assistant professors, 24% associate professors, 31% full professors and 13% had no academic rank. PS faculty had significantly more publications, a higher H index, and more high level NIH funding early in their careers at the assistant professor level compared to general surgeons. PS faculty at the associate professor level had equivalent high level NIH funding, but lower recentness and academic power compared to general surgeons. Professors of PS rebounded slightly, with only observed deficiencies in number of citations compared to general surgeons.

PS faculty in assistant professor ranks has higher scholarly productivity compared to equivalently ranked general surgeons. Despite some mild academic setbacks in midcareer, pediatric surgeons are able to maintain similar academic productivity to their general surgery colleagues by the time they are full professors.

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