Institutional Contributions to the Radiology Literature: A Subspecialty Assessment

Area of Science:

• Academic Radiology
• Bibliometrics
• Research Funding

Background:

• Academic radiology departments exhibit diverse research profiles across subspecialties.
• The link between institutional research output and National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in radiology subspecialties is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate institutional scholarly output in U.S. academic radiology subspecialties.
• To assess the association between bibliometric performance and NIH radiology funding.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional analysis of U.S. academic radiology faculty using Scopus data.
• Categorization into eight subspecialties and aggregation of publications, citations, and h-index.
• Comparison with 2025 NIH radiology funding rankings using Spearman's rank correlation.

Main Results:

• Scholarly output and NIH funding are highly concentrated in a small number of institutions.
• Total publications, citations, and summed faculty h-index strongly correlated with NIH funding rank (ρ > 0.70).
• Subspecialty leadership varied significantly, and per-faculty metrics identified smaller, productive programs.

Conclusions:

• Radiology scholarly productivity is concentrated in a few academic centers with significant subspecialty variation.
• Aggregate bibliometric indicators demonstrate moderate agreement with NIH funding.
• Cumulative scholarly output appears to reflect institutional research strength in academic radiology.