The Voices of Medical Education Science: Describing the Published Landscape

Abstract

Introduction: Medical education has been described as a dynamic and growing field, driven in part by its unique body of scholarship. The voices of authors who publish medical education literature have a powerful impact on the discourses of the community. While there have been numerous studies looking at aspects of this literature, there has been no comprehensive view of recent publications. Method: The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis of all articles published in 24 medical education journals published between 2000-2020 to identify article characteristics, with an emphasis on author gender, geographic location, and institutional affiliation. This study replicates and greatly expands on two previous investigations by examining all articles published in these core medical education journals. Results: The journals published 37,263 articles with the majority of articles published in 2020 (n=3,957, 10.7%) and the least in 2000 (n=711, 1.9%) representing a 456.5% increase. The articles were authored by 139,325 authors of which 62,708 were unique. Males were more prevalent across all authorship positions (n=62,828; 55.7%) than females (n=49,975; 44.3%). Authors listed 154 country affiliations with the United States (n=42,236, 40.4%), United Kingdom (n=12,967, 12.4%), and Canada (n=10,481, 10.0%) most represented. Ninety-three countries (60.4%) were low- or middle-income countries accounting for 9,684 (9.3%) author positions. Few articles were written by multinational teams (n=3,765; 16.2%). Authors listed affiliations with 4,372 unique institutions. Across all author positions, 48,189 authors (46.1%) were affiliated with a top 200 institution, as ranked by the Times Higher Education ranking. Discussion: There is a relative imbalance of author voices in medical education. If the field values a diversity of perspectives, there is considerable opportunity for improvement.

Joining the meta-research movement: A bibliometric case study of the journal <em>Perspectives on Medical Education</em>

“…We were unable to determine the gender of 5% of names. Men and women were similarly productive (1.4 vs. 1.3 documents per author, respectively) and collaborative (5.0 vs. 4.7 co-authors per author, respectively), which aligns with related findings suggesting relative gender parity in HPE publications in recent years [ 26 , 27 ]. The most productive authors were Lingard with 20 and Leppink with 16 publications (see Tab.…”

“…While PME received and published manuscripts from around the world, the majority of those manuscripts, as well as the majority of the researchers who peer reviewed those manuscripts, were affiliated with Western countries. While this finding aligns with the broader literature [ 26 , 28 ] and statistics from other journals in the field (e.g., Medical Education [ 31 ]), we feel there is an urgent need to grow our global representation and, as Kusurkar recently wrote in a PME editorial, work toward fixing the “leaky pipeline” of medical education researchers [ 32 ]. To this end, we are strategizing with our editorial team and editors of other HPE journals on how to more fully involve authors, readers, reviewers, and editors from around the globe.…”

“…The presence of these predominantly Western institutional and geographical affiliations aligns with patterns observed in HPE more broadly [ 26 – 28 ], although authors from the Netherlands are more heavily represented. The prevalence of Dutch authors and editorial board members is likely an artifact of the journal’s history; that is, the journal originated in the Netherlands, where it remains today, and is sponsored by the NVMO.…”

“Can you recommend a&nbsp;journal for my paper?”

“…What is new is the option to deposit unreviewed empirical work as a preprint on an open access repository, such as arXiv.org, bioRxiv.org or ResearchSquare.com. These serve the rapid exchange of scientific advances, and some HPE editors encourage this [ 7 , 8 ].”…”

Traditional Chinese Exercise for Neurodegenerative Diseases: A Bibliometric and Visualized Analysis With Future Directions

“…Using these maps, information is readily accessible for readers to intuitively understand the research hotspots and development processes of various knowledge domains (Zhou et al, 2022). In medical research, CiteSpace-based bibliometric analysis has been extensively conducted to allow scientists to explore the structures and dynamics of a certain field during a given period (Maggio et al, 2022), so as to establish its general outline and discovering future research directions (Janmaijaya et al, 2018).…”