C. B. Davis1, S. Kurapati1, T. W. King1 1University of Alabama at Birmingham,Department Of Plastic Surgery,Birmingham, ALABAMA, USA
Introduction: Choosing a residency program is the most important decision in a medical student’s career. Most specialties have significant resources to help inform student decision making. However, there is a significant deficit in reliable ranking lists of Plastic Surgery Programs. The available resources for plastic surgery residency programs primarily includes the Doximity Residency Navigator, which provides subjective and objective rankings of programs with a set algorithm for all specialties, and other crowdsourcing internet resources with questionable reliability. Previous studies have investigated the role of bibliometric measures of plastic surgery faculty in correlation to academic rank, gender disparities, and program size. In this study, we introduce a new standardized model of residency program ranking focused on bibliometric measures of academic achievement to give prospective students a reliable and readily updated list of plastic surgery residency programs’ academic rank.
Methods: A comprehensive list of plastic surgery residency programs was compiled from FREIDA Online (Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database). The following data was obtained for each program: list of full time faculty, amount of 2017 National Institute of Health (NIH) and (Veterans Administration) VA funding, lifetime and 5 year h-index of each faculty member, and faculty position on editorial boards of 9 major plastic surgery journals. The h-index represents the productivity and impact of a faculty member as measured by number of publications and the citations of those publications. The overall ranking of the top twenty-five programs was determined by weighting each factor reflective of academic achievement equally. The five categories of measurement included lifetime and 5 year h-index, annual funding, faculty positions on journal editorial boards, and number of faculty members at each program.
Results: Summary results for each individual category were determined. The top program for annual funding was the University of Southern California. The top programs based on lifetime h-index of faculty members were the University of Michigan (integrated) and Harvard University (independent). University of Pennsylvania programs were ranked first for 5 year h-index of faculty members. Harvard University programs were ranked first in the presence of faculty members on journal editorial boards.
Conclusion: While there are many criteria that can be used to evaluate a residency program, academic achievement is one of the important factors a prospective student might use in selecting a residency program. We present a rank model that incorporates the most impactful metrics in determining academic productivity in a standardized format that can be readily updated annually to provide a reliable and easily accessible resource for prospective students.