Evaluating Academic Productivity of Hematology/Oncology Fellows

Many hematology/oncology fellows who train at Comprehensive Cancer Centers (CCCs) seek academic careers. However, it is difficult to assess the impact of research conducted during fellowship, as it takes about three years for citation counts to stabilize. Altmetric Score (AS) is an alternative metric with an expedited time to maturity that quantifies article impact via online mentions. We aim to evaluate the academic productivity of these fellows using both traditional and alternative metrics. We compiled a list of heme/onc fellows who graduated In 2025 from each program website. We then performed a PubMed search for articles published by each fellow during their fellowship training. We acquired AS from the Altmetric API database. 545 fellows from 125 US-based programs published a total of 1430 papers (3.39 vs 1.71, p<0.001), with 483 as first author (1.25 vs 0.45, p<0.001), that accrued 7351 citations (19.75 vs 6.04, p<0.001) and an AS of 20614 (58.03 vs 13.80, p<0.001), with an average citation count of 2.74 (3.45 vs 1.89, p=0.002) and average AS of 6.70 (8.89 vs 4.10, p<0.001) for CCC-trained fellows compared to non-CCC-trained fellows. There was no significant difference in effect size between average citation count and average AS (95% confidence interval 0.631-0.951 vs 0.635-0.955). Fellows who trained at CCCs published significantly more total papers, first author papers, and accrued greater total and average citation counts and AS than those who did not. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the novel, yet more practical, metric of AS and the widely-used citation count in this cohort. Future work can explore the potential for real-world use of AS as a quantifiable measure in academic hiring processes.