Resident Scholarly Activity and Productivity Outcomes Before and After Implementing a Structured Research Program: A Before–After Study

Objectives

Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs require participation in scholarly activity. In 2017, we launched a formal Resident Research Program (RRP) for physician residents in our 3-year accredited residency program. We aimed to measure the association between the implementation of the RRP and resident scholarly productivity.

Methods

This analysis was a before-after study of residents in a Midwestern university-based EM residency program (7–10 per class) graduating between 2013 and 2023. The RRP was implemented in July 2017 and offered resources and requirements; our study compared outcomes before and after the launch of the program. We provided a dedicated training program study coordinator, 24-h in-house research assistants, faculty/research staff mentorship, and research funding. Residents were required to complete a hypothesis-driven research project and submit an abstract to a professional meeting or manuscript for publication. We tracked scholarly productivity per class, including publications, presentations, first-author manuscripts, and faculty publications with a resident. We measured the association between the RRP and scholarly productivity through univariate Poisson regression models to report the unadjusted rate ratio (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI).

Results

Ninety residents were included (n = 43 after RRP launch). Annual mean resident scholarly productivity increased post-intervention for publications (10.4 vs. 6.2 publications per class, RR 1.68, 95% CI 1.09–2.59), presentations (7.4 vs. 3.7 abstracts per class, RR 2.01, 95% CI 1.19–3.42), and first-author publications (5.8 vs. 2.2 publications per class, RR 2.66, 95% CI 1.40–5.09). No significant change in faculty co-authors was observed (12.8 vs. 9.5, RR 1.35, 95% CI 0.95–1.92).

Conclusions

The implementation of a structured RRP was associated with increased resident scholarly productivity. The targeted research resources served as both a strategy to support resident research and enhance departmental academic engagement. Future research should examine the perceptions, quality, and impact of scholarly activity requirements on residents.