Professors of orthopedic surgery, by dint of their elevation to the highest academic rank, are men and women of achievement. Some of these surgeons have made their professional contribution primarily as clinicians; some have excelled as teachers. The common attribute of all medical school professors, though, is academic productivity, manifest in the form of scholarly publications.
The question of how much scholarly productivity is enough is of practical concern to junior faculty members contemplating their own chances for being promoted to the rank of professor. Specifically, a junior faculty member may wonder if his or her current performance augurs well for promotion. For these young faculty members (and the mentors advising them), there are not much objective data to offer guidance.
Research within other surgical subspecialties has revealed that the Hirsch index (h-index) is correlated with promotion to full professorship status.1,2 (An author earns an h-index of h if h of his or her papers has at least h citations.3 For example, an author of 10 papers each cited once and an author of 1 paper cited 10 times both have an h-index of 1, whereas an author of 5 papers each cited 5 times has an h-index of 5, as does an author of 10 papers, 5 of which were cited 5 times or more, and 5 of which were cited 4 or fewer times.) To our knowledge, within orthopedic surgery there has been only 1 study of the relationship between early-career academic output and ultimate academic rank—a single-institution study of 130 residents showing that those pursuing academic careers published more articles during residency.4
To help address the relationship between early-career academic output and the attainment of professorship, we performed a bibliometric benchmarking analysis of current orthopedic surgery professors’ productivity at a point likely before they were promoted to that rank. In measuring the early scholarly output of these now senior surgeons, we aim to give younger faculty members a basis of comparison for their own output and thus a sense of where they stand. Although a purely bibliometric analysis must be understood as a crude measure—one that fails to capture any of a professor’s attributes in a domain other than scholarly output—it may nevertheless serve as a basis for meaningful advice.
Therefore, we performed a bibliometric analysis to determine the number of scholarly papers published by current professors of orthopedic surgery within 5 years after their having acquired American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (ABOS) certification (termed early scholarly output). We tried to determine not only quantity (how many papers were published) but quality (how often papers were cited). Last, by comparing professors across periods, we tried to address the relevant question of whether professor-worthy early output is increasing over time.
Methods
A cohort of orthopedic surgery professors at nominally elite medical schools was constructed as follows. The U.S. News & World Report ranking list was consulted to identify the top 10 US medical schools, and in February 2014 the website of each school was accessed to identify the orthopedic surgery faculty. Names of orthopedic surgery professors were noted. The website for Duke University did not list academic ranks, so data for this school were obtained by personal communication. Whether a professor’s title included the clinical descriptor was documented.
The ABOS website was then consulted to determine which of the faculty members were board-certified. Only certified faculty members were retained.
The Web of Science research platform (wokinfo.com) was used to identify each faculty member’s early scholarly output in the field of orthopedics. After limiting the period under consideration to 5 years after the author was ABOS-certified, we performed an author search using all combinations of first and middle initials. Results were then refined by category orthopedics and document type article. To reinforce the search specificity, we manually reviewed the generated bibliography and retained only correctly identified papers.
A Web of Science citation report was then generated for the author. All bibliometric data were recorded. The quantity of early output was logged as number of papers in 1 of 3 bins: first author, last author, and middle author (any author except first or last). Quality was approximated by total number of times the author was cited across total output. In addition, number of publications in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research (CORR) and Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS) was recorded.
To further make an inference about the importance of papers published in this early career window, we calculated an h-index for this “5 years post ABOS certification” bibliography. As noted, an author earns an h-index of h if h of his or her papers has at least h citations.