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Institutional Research Collaborations and Match Outcomes in Orthopedic Surgery Residency: A Cross-sectional Analysis
Bryce Michael1, Adrian Bozocea2, Diego Garcia3
1Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.
Objective:
To determine whether publishing at a given institution is associated with matching there for orthopedic surgery residency, and whether this association reflects publication presence or sustained concentration of work at an institution, with exploratory analyses of publication network characteristics.
Design:
Cross-sectional bibliometric analysis of the 2024 to 2025 NRMP and military match cycles using manually verified publication data with institutional affiliations. Primary analysis used chi-square tests and logistic regression with Bonferroni correction (α = 0.025) to examine associations between institutional publication affiliations and match outcomes.
Setting:
Multi-institutional analysis of 221 ACGME-accredited orthopedic surgery residency programs across the United States.
Participants:
Of 954 matched first-year orthopedic surgery residents, with verified publication data obtained for 661 residents (69.3%) comprising 4077 PubMed-indexed publications classified by institutional affiliation as home or external with network characteristics.
Results:
Among residents with verified publications (mean 5.92 publications per resident, median 3.0), 165 (25.0%) matched at an institution where they had previously published, compared with 3.8% expected by chance (χ² = 178.3, p < 0.001). To distinguish whether this association reflected publication presence or sustained engagement, we used the home institution-identifiable for every applicant-as a test case. Of 153 (23.1%) matched at home, but having a single home institution publication was not associated with home matching (19.6% vs 18.8%, p = 0.865); however, the proportion of publications at the home institution was the strongest predictor of home matching (odds ratio = 2.17, 95% confidence interval: 1.27-3.73, p = 0.005).
Conclusions:
Publishing at a residency program was strongly associated with matching there, at a rate approximately 7 times higher than chance. The mere presence of a home institution publication did not predict home matching, but the proportion of publications concentrated at the home institution did. These findings suggest that sustained research engagement at target programs may be meaningfully associated with match outcomes.