My name is Farhan Mahmood, and I am joined here today by my colleague Frederick Tsang, and our project is called Research Productivity of Pediatric Neurosurgery in Canada. Research is a core part of neurosurgery training and practice. The conduction of quality research in neurosurgery relies on neurosurgeons who are often trained as either clinicians and or clinician scientists. Recently, there has been greater attention on quantifying and comparing the research productivity between individuals and institutions via bibliometric studies. However, limited data exists on the research productivity of actively practicing Canadian pediatric neurosurgeons with or without advanced degrees, and whether demographic predictors of neurosurgeons correlates with productivity. Our primary objective includes investigating whether the completion of advanced degrees, such as master's or PhD degrees, is a predictor of research productivity amongst Canadian pediatric neurosurgeons. Our secondary objective includes assessing the relationship between research productivity and publication type, and also the neurosurgeon demographics, such as location of practice. This study was a retrospective bibliometric study, and the databases used included PubMed and River Science. Our cohort was 39 actively practicing Canadian pediatric neurosurgeons, and the outcome that we were assessing was research productivity of Canadian pediatric neurosurgeons, which was measured using publication volume, the rates of publication, the number of citations, and the number of first and or last authorships. Data points included surgeon level and publication level. Surgeon level data points included institution of practice, year of medical school graduation, and any advanced degree completions or graduate degrees. Publication level data included journal name, year of publication, and clinical article tier. Clinical article tier was a classification we used, which is also used by Leit et al. in 2019, and this is a four-tier classification system, which basically divides papers into their specific types. Tier one includes RCTs and controlled prospective studies. Tier two includes systematic reviews. Tier three includes case reports and more papers that are similar, and tier zero includes other papers such as pedagogical. We identified a total of 39 actively practicing pediatric neurosurgeons using publicly available data, so some of the demographic characteristics we collected, including for medical training as well as fellowship, you can see on the screen now. We also collected whether the surgeon had any advanced degrees as well as their current academic rank. We had 2,823 unique publications spanning 3,615 authorship events, and what you see on the screen there is the clinical papers only, so that's 2,208, and we manually curated them into the clinical article tiers from Leit et al. 2019. So here we're showing the coefficients of the negative binomial models we fit to the data in order to explain productivity in terms of parameters of surgeon training. So here we've controlled for time since medical school graduation with an offset term in the model. In the leftmost data column, we're showing the negative binomial coefficients, essentially the effect sizes, different values for each of the variables highlighted. Essentially, one can interpret the numbers in the brackets as how many times more publications that a surgeon would have with that training over the reference value, and of course, only some of these coefficients are statistically significant. So for total publications, perhaps not surprising, but in our data set having a PhD as well as any kind of fellowship training meant you publish roughly three to four times as many total publications. So for those 615 basic science publications only, not clinical papers, the effect size of having a PhD or some fellowship training other than pediatric neurosurgery is quite large, so this is obviously due to small sample size, but it could also be due to some individuals in the data set who are highly active in basic science without having a pediatric fellowship. So this is for tier one clinical publications, so namely multi-center perspective and controlled. So fellowship training is more predictive than having a PhD, and so this is being driven by probably large academic centers who are likely to participate in multi-center longitudinal collaborations that are also likely to hire fellowship trained surgeons. And we see this picture as well for first authorships is likely due to fellowship being an additional time to produce first author research while in training. Also master's degree was actually not a significant predictor of research productivity in our data set. A PhD though was, but not for sort of tier one clinical research as well as first authorships, but fellowship in general as well as pediatrics specifically was predictive of high quality clinical research as well as first authorships, and all of this has to be couched in the terms of our small sample size.

research productivity

pediatric neurosurgeons

Canada

advanced degrees

publication type