Impact of Longitudinal Focused Academic Time on Resident Scholarly Activity

Meeting the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education scholarly activity requirement can be challenging for residents. Time to engage in research is one of the commonly perceived barriers. To address this barrier, our residency program implemented a focused academic time initiative of a half day per week that can be taken while on rotation. At the end of the third year of implementation, we assessed the effectiveness of this initiative on the productivity of resident scholarly activity.

Radiology resident scholarly activity submitted to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education web-based Accreditation Data System were reviewed and compared to the three academic years before (July 1, 2012-June 30, 2015) and three academic years after (July 1, 2015-June 30, 2018) implementing the focused research time. The types of scholarly activity, which consisted of peer-reviewed journal publications, national conference presentations, and textbook chapters were captured. PubMed-Indexed for MEDLINE (PMID) number was used to confirm publications. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.

The total number of residents per year, ranging between 37-40, was similar between the academic years 2012-2015 (116 residents total) and 2015-2018 (117 residents total). After initiating focused academic time, the number of publications increased from 45 to 75 (67%), presentations at conferences increased from 112 to 128 (14%), the number of textbook chapters increased from 4 to 15 (275%), and total number of first author publications by residents increased from 21 to 28 (33% increase).

Longitudinal focused academic time of half a day per week increased productivity of scholarly activity among our radiology residents.