Improving the Care of Our Patients: Twenty-Three Years of the James Barrett Brown Resident Research Day

James Barrett Brown was one of the founders of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery as a specialty in the United States. Susan Mackinnon started the James Barrett Brown Resident Research Day in 1997 in his honor to serve as an annual opportunity for trainees to present their research to the Division and a visiting contemporary leader in plastic surgery. We sought to determine the proportion of Resident Research Day projects that have progressed to publication.

Available internal records from 1998 to 2019 were used to identify presenters and projects. Academic productivity of presenters was estimated with the h-index from the Scopus database.

One hundred forty-five students, residents, and fellows presented 276 projects at Resident Research Day from 1998 to 2019. These presentations were associated with 144 unique peer-reviewed publications, representing 52% of the presented projects. They were published an average of 1.8 years after presentation, and the presenter was the first or last author on 67% of them. The current average h-index of trainees who published at least 1 project (8.3) is significantly higher than the h-index of those who did not (5.0, P < 0.001).

The James Barrett Brown Resident Research Day not only honors the legacy of Brown but also enhances scholarly activity of trainees. The opportunity to present and publish research teaches project planning, implementation, and data analysis, followed by manuscript preparation and the publication process. This important skill set can provide the foundation for the academic careers of future leaders in plastic surgery.