The Neurosurgery Match: A Bibliometric Analysis of 206 First-Year Residents

Background and objective: An important component of the residency application for neurosurgery is research experience and the subsequent number of produced publications. Bibliometrics research has been developed to establish quantitative methods for the standardization of publishing impactful research. This study aims to quantify the research productivity of medical students who successfully matriculated into a Neurosurgery residency program.

Methods: We initially identified first-year neurosurgery residents for the 2016-2017 academic year of all U.S. neurosurgical residency programs through departmental websites. The Scopus database was then queried for all articles published in the years 2006 to 2015 by first-year residents and bibliometric variables, such as publication count, journal impact factors, and author h-index, were extracted. The main outcome measured was residency program, tiered 1-5 by total departmental faculty research output.

Results: Two hundred six (206) Scopus records for first-year neurosurgery residents were identified in 99 programs nationwide. Multivariate ordinal regression demonstrated that only h-index was independently associated with tier of matriculation (P = 0.043). H-index was observed to strongly correlate with the number of original research articles (P = 0.005), years since first publication (P < 0.0001), and journal impact factor (P = 0.048) as assessed by multiple linear regression. Notably, h-index was observed to increase by approximately 1 point with every 3 original research articles (B = 0.368) and 4 years since first publication (B = 0.257).

Conclusions: H-index is a powerful research predictor of matching into neurosurgical research institutions and can be improved by starting research early, targeting high impact journals, and participating in original clinical and laboratory investigations.