Objectives: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires that scholarly activity be carried out in residency programs without numerical guidelines for publication of papers by residents. Until now, publication-to-resident ratios (PTRR) have not been reported in internal medicine (IM) programs. This article describes the 5-year resident publication record of an IM program with a points-based scholarly activity policy.
Methods: Articles published by residents in the said program from July 2007 to June 2012 were collated based on PubMed searches and author reports. A PTRR was calculated across the 5-year period.
Results: A total of 57 unique resident papers were identified. Over the 5 years, the publication-to-resident ratio was 0.88 for IM residents, the highest reported in any graduate medical education program to date.
Conclusions: A PTRR was seen in an IM program with a points-based scholarly activity policy. Further studies are needed to determine whether points-based policies encourage publication of scholarly papers among residents.