Academic productivity and NIH funding for anesthesiology departmental chairs: A 15-year comparison

This study evaluated whether there were improvements in the number of departmental National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grants and the academic productivity of departmental chairs in terms of NIH research funding and PubMed-cited publications when compared to chairs of the same departments in 2006.

Each chair was identified from the Society of Academic Associations of Academic Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine's Association of Academic Anesthesiology Chairs and entered into the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORTER), PubMed, SCOPUS, and the National Provider Identifier Registry.

The number and funding amounts of training grants awarded to the department in 2010, 2015, and 2020 were obtained as well as the department's national ranking and total dollar amount for NIH funding in 2020. For the current chair cohort, total publications and m-quotient (h-index corrected for active research years) were recorded along with each chair's history of NIH grant funding. These data were compared to a previous study of anesthesiology chairs that reviewed funding and publications through 2006.

We analyzed data from 100 academic departments of anesthesiology and compared their scholarly activity relative to data gathered in 2006. In 2020, 52 of 100 departments of anesthesiology had evidence of NIH funding. There were not statistically significant (P > 0.05) differences in grants funding obtained by chairs between 2006 and 2020 with the exception that more chairs in 2006 had program or center grants. Median publications for chairs significantly increased from 35 in 2006 to 55 in 2021 (IRR = 1.5, 95% CI = 1.2-2.0, P = 0.003). Nineteen percent of chairs were female, which did not significantly differ from the proportion of women in the 2006 paper (15%, χ² = 0.57, df = 1, P = 0.452). Of the male chairs, 90% were professors whereas 63% of female chairs were professors (χ² = 8.8, df = 1, P = 0.003). Female chairs had fewer publications than male chairs (IRR = 1.8, 95% CI = 1.2-1.8, P = 0.002); however, m-quotients were not significantly different between men and women (P = 0.602).

When compared to 2006, department of anesthesiology chairs had more publications in 2021; however, NIH funding rates remained unchanged. The specialty had 19% female chairs, and those chairs had fewer publications than their male counterparts, though sex differences were attenuated using metrics that account for disparities in career length.