Surgical trainee research collaboratives in the UK: an observational study of research activity and publication productivity

Objectives: To analyse the research activity and publication output of surgical trainee research collaboratives in the UK. Setting: Surgical trainee research collaboratives in the UK. Participants: A total of 24 collaboratives were included in this study from 33 identified organisations. We excluded one group that focused purely on systematic review of the literature and eight groups for which we could not identify suitable data sources (website or trainee committee contact). Primary and secondary outcome: Primary datapoints were identified for each collaborative including surgical subspeciality, numbers and types of projects. For published articles, secondary outcomes including study population size, journal impact factor, number of citations and evidence level were collected. Results: A total of 24 collaboratives met our inclusion criteria with a portfolio of 80 projects. The project types included audit (46%), randomised clinical trial (16%), surveys (16%), cohort studies (10%), systematic reviews (2.5%) and other or unidentifiable (9.5%). A total of 35 publications were identified of which just over half (54%) were original research articles. The median size of studied population was 540 patients with a range from 108 to 3138. The published works provided a varied compilation of evidence levels ranging from 1b (individual RCT) to 5 (expert opinion) with a median level of 2b (individual cohort study). The West Midlands Research Collaborative had the highest number of publications (13), citations (130) and h-index (5). Conclusions: The experience of UK-based trainee research collaboratives provides useful insights for trainees and policymakers in global healthcare systems on the value and feasibility of trainee-driven high quality surgical research.