How productive is the discipline of family medicine in research? NAPCRG’s Committee on Building Research Capacity and the Academic Family Medicine Organization (AFMO) Research Subcommittee has undertaken an initiative to document the progress family medicine has made in research and its successes in reaching the discipline’s strategic plan goals for research expansion.1 Key measurable indicators are changes in the volume and focus of published family medicine research articles and changes in the number and types of individuals and organizations that produce these articles. In 2001, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were charged with designing and undertaking a process for periodically identifying and quantifying family medicine’s published research. The process undertaken and findings from the first round of this project were posted recently on NAPCRG’s Web site (http://www.napcrg.org/org.html) and are described briefly here.
PROJECT GOALS, DEFINITIONS, AND METHODS
The initial effort identified research articles appearing during the 24 months of 1999 and 2000 in US and international journals. It identified articles from individuals working in US family medicine organizations, whether family physicians or researchers trained in other fields. Only research articles were included, specifically, articles that presented and analyzed new data or undertook new analyses of existing data (eg, meta-analyses). Scholarly work other than research, such as editorials and clinical review articles, were not included, nor was research disseminated through means other than journals, such as in newsletters and unpublished reports. Research published by eligible authors was included regardless of its topic, methods, or relevance to practicing family physicians. This effort identified, therefore, the published research output of a group of individuals—those working in US family medicine organizations.
Eligible authors and articles were located by a variety of search strategies in a sequential, iterative, and “snowball” approach, which included (1) hand searches of every 1999 and 2000 issue of 80 relevant journals, (2) electronic searches of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) health-related periodicals databases using the term “family” in the organizational affiliation field, and (3) author name searches of NLM databases. When authors’ eligibility was uncertain, Web sites of their organizations and national physician compendia (eg, the ABFP Web site) were reviewed.
Eligible Articles and Authors Found
Analyses of the identified eligible articles and authors showed that family medicine researchers published far more than previously estimated. A total of 484 eligible research articles were published in 1999 and 496 in 2000, and eligible family medicine researchers were the lead authors of 690 of the 980 articles (70.4%). A total of 869 eligible family medicine authors published during these 2 years; 433 served as lead authors of at least 1 paper. The mean number of published papers per eligible author for the 2 years was 2.24, with median and mode of 1 article and range from 1 to 28 articles. Fifty eligible authors published from 6 to 10 research articles, and 16 authors published 11 or more articles.
The volume of family medicine published research has been underestimated in part because of the number and variety of journals in which this work appears—236 different journals in 2 years! The 4 family medicine journals that were publishing research in 1999 and 2000— The Journal of Family Practice, Family Medicine, Archives of Family Medicine, and The Journal of the American Board of Family Practice—together published 340 eligible research articles, or 34.7% of all eligible articles. Thirty research articles appeared in top-tier journals, including 20 in JAMA and 4 in the NEJM. Researchers in academic family medicine departments constituted the great majority of eligible authors—83%—whereas researchers in residencies based in nonuniversity hospitals made up only 10% and community practitioners only 3% of authors.
The Future of This Initiative
The second round of article and author searches for studies published in 2003 is now underway; the results will be available in the summer of 2005. Changes in the volume and content of published research from 1999 and 2000 to 2003 will be used as one metric to assess the success of the recent efforts of the discipline to build its research enterprise and empiric foundation.
REFERENCE
- 1.NAPCRG Committee on Building Research Capacity and the Academic Family Medicine Organizations Research Subcommittee. What does it mean to build research capacity? Fam Med. 2002;34:678–684. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]