Arms Race Control Score Standardizes Residency Applicant Publication Assessment.

Area of Science:

• Neurosurgery Residency Applications
• Medical Education
• Publication Metrics

Background:

• The
• arms race
• in publications among residency applicants is increasing exponentially.
• Publication count is a key predictor of neurosurgery residency
• Match
• success.
• Existing metrics do not objectively assess the effort behind publications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce an objective metric, the Publication Effort Score (PES) and Publication Value Unit (PVU), to assess residency applicant authorship effort.
• To develop the Arms Race Control Score (ARCS) by excluding low-effort publications.
• To evaluate the impact of ARCS on applicant ranking.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective quantitative assessment of 537 publications from 57 neurosurgery residency applicants (2022-2023 Match cycle).
• A 4-point PES scale was used, with PVU calculated based on PES and authorship position.
• ARCS was computed by removing publications with PVU ≤ 1 from the cumulative PVU (cPVU).

Main Results:

• Mean publications per applicant: 9.28.
• 26.1% of publications were considered minimal effort (PVU ≤ 1).
• ARCS implementation significantly altered rankings for 61.4% of applicants, with notable shifts in the top 10.

Conclusions:

• ARCS provides a standardized method to evaluate publication authorship effort in residency applications.
• This metric may incentivize a focus on higher-effort publications, addressing the publication
• arms race
• .
• Automated ARCS scoring is available online for future
• Match
• cycles.