Assistant Professor Bernard Millie Duker Childrens Hospital Albany, New York, United States
Background: Nationally, resident research education strives to meet accreditation standards including the scholarly requirements of residents and faculty. The pediatric and med/peds residency programs struggled with research productivity due to a lack of training and access to expertise needed to develop a practical resident-led projects. In 2015, we developed PedSTAR (Scholarly Track for Academics & Research), which evolved into a protected two-week curriculum that harnesses institutional expertise to provide residents with practical research education, to develop projects that can be executed while in clinical training. PedSTAR provides is nearly cost-free and has created a space for other educational experiences for our residents. Objective: Describe the impact of establishing a research curriculum on resident scholarly output in a small-to-medium sized General Pediatrics and Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program over 9 years. Design/Methods: This is an IRB-exempt retrospective study comparing scholarly output of residents before a formal research curriculum (Group 1, classes 2013-16) to residents who experienced the current 2-week program (Group 3, classes 2019-23). The residents from 2017-2018 experienced a transitional 2-3 day curriculum and are not included. Topics covered include research modalities, IRB, software tutorials (reference managers, surveys), biostatistics, abstract writing, and presentations. Peer-reviewed publications that were print or e-published either 2 years prior or 3 years post-graduation were included, using internal tracking systems, cross-checked with Google Scholar, and PubMed. When multiple residents coauthored scholarly work, credit was given to each. Results: 98 (31 Med/Peds) residents' outcomes were reviewed from 2013 through 2022. See Table 1. Residents without research training (Group 1) averaged 0.48 publications from residency. Residents from the 2-week PedSTAR curriculum averaged 0.81 publications during their training, an increase approaching significance, compared to Group 1. Of note, MedPeds residents typically have more output, with 4 years of training.
Conclusion(s): This research curriculum has increased the scholarly output of the General Pediatric and Medicine-Pediatric residents who have participated in the PedSTAR program. We expect further growth in output as future classes complete their training. PedSTAR is noteworthy for being a sustainable, low-cost educational intervention which is applicable to any specialty and can be implemented at institutions of any size.
