Factors Impacting Scholarship Delay for Early Career URiM Faculty in Academic Medicine

Academic advancement requires scholarship productivity. Faculty underrepresented in medicine (URiM) face unique challenges that hinder their scholarship productivity. We introduce the term "scholarship delay" as a phenomenon that affects early career academic faculty and describe what is known in the literature about this phenomenon among URiM faculty.

For the narrative review, we searched PubMed between November 2023 and September 2024 for articles describing URiM publication productivity. Out of 2,351 initial results, we included articles published between 2000 and 2024 and produced in the United States. After excluding articles based on title and abstract content, we thoroughly examined 43 articles and selected 33 for this review. We included primary research articles including survey studies, literature reviews, and demographic data analyses.

Factors that mediate scholarship delay exist prior to one becoming a faculty member; URiM faculty and trainees are disproportionately affected. Several mediating factors cause scholarship delay, including lack of strong research mentorship and sponsorship, lack of protected time toward scholarly pursuits, and competing clinical responsibilities. Additionally, URiM faculty can suffer from unsupportive institutional cultures that lack resources or infrastructure to help them thrive in the production of scholarly work.

Scholarship delay is a significant and underreported phenomenon that affects early career URiM academic faculty and trainees. Solutions that may help mitigate this issue include rectifying barriers at the individual and institutional level prior to and during one's journey as a faculty member.