Scholarly Productivity and Impact: Developing a Quantifiable, Norm-based Benchmarking Methodology for Academic...

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Academic Medicine
• Scholarly Productivity

Background:

• Benchmarking scholarly productivity in emergency medicine is difficult.
• Existing performance indicators lack normative references.
• A new methodology was developed to assess academician productivity and impact.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a methodology for benchmarking scholarly productivity and impact in emergency medicine.
• To establish normative references for academic emergency medicine faculty.
• To aid in performance reviews, promotions, and hiring decisions.

Main Methods:

• Defined time frame (2011-2015) and scholarly metrics (publications, citations per publication).
• Identified a representative population of 6,727 US academic emergency medicine faculty.
• Utilized an analytic tool to compile publication and citation data, creating benchmarking statistics and percentile ranks.

Main Results:

• Benchmarking rulers were created using percentile ranks for publications and citations per publication.
• Newly graduated faculty demonstrated higher scholarly productivity compared to earlier graduates within the same rank.
• Benchmarking tables allow individual comparison against established norms.

Conclusions:

• The developed benchmarking method provides a model for assessing scholarly productivity in emergency medicine.
• This methodology has significant implications for faculty performance evaluation, promotion, and hiring.
• It offers a standardized approach to evaluating both individual and group academic productivity.