Research by pathologists in the United States: analysis of publications

Academic pathology is a unique profession in which the ability to pursue almost any type of academic or scholarly endeavor can be supported. Although it is difficult to define methods of comparing individual achievements in medicine, for investigative activity, common measures of academic productivity are numbers of peer-reviewed publications and National Institute of Health support. Articles from pathology departments were randomly selected from MEDLINE. One hundred and five articles were examined for the following features: financial support, human subjects, the presence of a photomicrograph, molecular biology techniques, and the number of times each article was cited as determined using the Science Citation Index. The articles were assigned to one of the following categories: anatomical pathology, clinical pathology, or research. The following percentages of articles were federally funded: total, 43.8; anatomical pathology, 33.3; clinical pathology, 9.5 and research, 74.4. The citations per article for federally funded and not federally funded articles, respectively, for each as these categories was as follows: total, 18.7 and 5.3; anatomical pathology, 15.7 and 5.5; clinical pathology, 2.0 and 4.9; and research, 21.4 and 5.7. It can be concluded from the data presented that federally funded articles from departments of pathology are cited more often than articles that are not federally funded. The most impressive finding in reviewing the articles is the wide diversity of research conducted in pathology departments. The use of federal funding or citation analysis to evaluate the performance of an individual pathologist would be a mistake.