Academic Productivity of Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-Accredited Critical Care Fellowship Program Directors

Objectives: Academic productivity is an expectation for program directors of Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited subspecialty programs in critical care medicine. Within the adult critical care Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited programs, we hypothesized that program director length of time from subspecialty critical care certification would correlate positively with academic productivity, and primary field would impact academic productivity. Design: This study received Institutional Review Board exemption from the University of Florida. Data were obtained from public websites on program directors from all institutions that had surgery, anesthesiology, and pulmonary Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited subspecialty critical care training programs during calendar year 2012. Information gathered included year of board certification and appointment to program director, academic rank, National Institutes of Health funding history, and PubMed citations. Results: Specialty area was significantly associated with total (all types of publications) (p = 0.0002), recent (p < 0.0001), last author (p = 0.008), and original research publications (p < 0.0001), even after accounting for academic rank, years certified, and as a program director. These differences were most prominent in full professors, with surgery full professors having more total, recent, last author, and original research publications than full professors in the other critical care specialties. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that one's specialty area in critical care is an independent predictor of academic productivity, with surgery having the highest productivity. For some metrics, such as total and last author publications, surgery had more publications than both anesthesiology and pulmonary, whereas there was no difference between the latter groups. This suggests that observed differences in academic productivity vary by specialty.