The Scholarly Output of Faculty in Family Medicine Departments

While prior efforts have assessed the scope of family medicine research, the methods have differed, and the efforts have not been routinely repeated. The purpose of this analysis was to quantify publications, journals, citations, and funding of US family medicine faculty and identify factors associated with these outcomes.

We identified faculty in US departments of family medicine through website searches and performed a cross-sectional study. We included 2015 publications in peer-reviewed journals indexed in Web of Science (a database that aggregates a wide range of catalogs). We calculated descriptive statistics assessing the publications, journals, and citations for family medicine faculty. We conducted bivariate analyses by department region, department size, public/private status, faculty title, and faculty degree.

We identified 6,738 faculty at 134 departments, with 15% of faculty having any publications. Family medicine faculty published 3,002 times (mean of 2.9 among those with any publications). The mean number of publications was highest for faculty in departments in the West (3.7), in the third quartile for size (3.6), with a professor title (4.0), and with combined MD or DO/PhD degrees (4.3). Faculty published 84% of the time in non-family medicine journals and were cited 13,548 times. Faculty listed federal funding for over half (52%) of the times they published.

Publications from family medicine faculty are not concentrated in family medicine journals and are being referenced by others. These figures are larger than prior estimates and should be tracked over time.