Physician educators' perceptions of experiences contributing to teaching

INTRODUCTION

Physician educators are essential in training the next generation of physicians. However, physician educators' perspectives about what experiences they find beneficial to their teaching and the prevalence of these experiences remain unknown. Guided by social cognitive career theory (SCCT) and communities of practice (CoP), we explored what experiences physician educators perceive as beneficial in preparing them to teach.

METHODS

In 2019, the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine in the United States surveyed its physician alumni to understand their education experiences during medical school, their current career path and what has contributed to their teaching role. Content analysis was applied to extract themes across the text response. Chi-square analysis was applied to examine if perceived contributing factors vary based on physician educators' gender, specialty and academic ranks.

RESULTS

The five most prevalent contributing factors participants (n = 781) identified are (1) experiences gained during residency and fellowship (29.8%), (2) teaching as faculty member (28.9%) and (3) class experiences and peer interaction during medical school (26%). We organised three themes that reflected major avenues of how physician educators acquire teaching skills: reflection about quality teaching, journey as learners and learning by doing. Gender and clinical specialty were differentially associated with contributing factors such as faculty development and meta-reflection.

CONCLUSION

The results are in line with theories of SCCT and CoP, in which we identified self-directed learning and regulation in shaping physician educators' teaching. The findings also revealed gaps and potential contexts for more formalised teaching practices to develop physician educators.

Describing the Landscape of Medical Education Preprints on MedRxiv: Current Trends and Future Recommendations

PURPOSE

A preprint is a version of a research manuscript posted to a preprint server prior to peer review. Preprints enable authors to quickly and openly share research, afford opportunities for expedient feedback, and enable immediate listing of research on grant and promotion applications. In medical education, most journals welcome preprints, which suggests preprints play a role in the field's discourse. Yet, little is known about medical education preprints, including author characteristics, preprint use, and ultimate publication status. This study provides an overview of preprints in medical education to better understand their role in the field's discourse.

METHOD

The authors queried medRxiv, a preprint repository, to identify preprints categorized as "medical education" and downloaded related metadata. CrossRef was queried to gather information on preprints later published in journals. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

RESULTS

Between 2019 and 2022, 204 preprints were classified in medRxiv as "medical education," with most deposited in 2021 (n = 76, 37.3%). On average, preprint full-texts were downloaded 1,875.2 times, and all were promoted on social media. Preprints were authored, on average, by 5.9 authors. Corresponding authors were based in 41 countries, with 45.6% in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Almost half (n = 101, 49.5%) became published articles in predominantly peer-reviewed journals. Preprints appeared in 65 peer-reviewed journals, with BMC Medical Education (n = 9, 8.9%) most represented.

CONCLUSIONS

Medical education research is being deposited as preprints, which are promoted, heavily accessed, and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, including medical education journals. Considering the benefits of preprints and the slowness of medical education publishing, it is likely that preprint depositing will increase and preprints will be integrated into the field's discourse. The authors propose next steps to facilitate responsible and effective creation and use of preprints.

In Search of a "Metric System" for Measuring Faculty Effort: A Qualitative Study on Educational Value Units at U.S. Medical Schools

PURPOSE

Faculty at academic health centers (AHCs) are charged with engaging in educational activities. Some faculty have developed educational value units (EVUs) to track the time and effort dedicated to these activities. Although several AHCs have adopted EVUs, there is limited description of how AHCs engage with EVU development and implementation. This study aimed to understand the collective experiences of AHCs with EVUs to illuminate benefits and barriers to their development, use, and sustainability.

METHOD

Eleven faculty members based at 10 AHCs were interviewed between July and November 2022 to understand their experiences developing and implementing EVUs. Participants were asked to describe their experiences with EVUs and to reflect on benefits and barriers to their development, use, and sustainability. Transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis.

RESULTS

EVU initiatives have been designed and implemented in a variety of ways, with no AHCs engaging alike. Despite differences, the authors identified shared themes that highlighted benefits and barriers to EVU development and implementation. Within and between these themes, a series of tensions were identified in conjunction with the ways in which AHCs attempted to mitigate them. Related to barriers, the majority of participants abandoned or paused their EVU initiatives; however, no differences were identified between those AHCs that retained EVUs and those that did not.

CONCLUSIONS

The collective themes identified suggest that AHCs implementing or sustaining an EVU initiative would need to balance benefits and barriers in light of their unique context. Study findings align with reviews on EVUs and provide additional nuance related to faculty motivation to engage in education and the difficulties of defining EVUs. The lack of differences observed between those AHCs that retained EVUs and those that did not suggests that EVUs may be challenging to implement because of the complexity of AHCs and their faculty.

Expanding Interdisciplinarity: A Bibliometric Study of Medical Education Using the Medical Education Journal List-24 (MEJ-24)

Introduction

Interdisciplinary research, which integrates input (e.g., data, techniques, theories) from two or more disciplines, is critical for solving wicked problems. Medical education research is assumed to be interdisciplinary. However, researchers have questioned this assumption. The present study, a conceptual replication, clarifies the nature of medical education interdisciplinarity by analyzing the citations of medical education journal articles.

Method

The authors retrieved the cited references of all articles in 22 medical education journals between 2001-2020 from Web of Science (WoS). We then identified the WoS classifications for the journals of each cited reference.

Results

We analyzed 31,283 articles referencing 723,683 publications. We identified 493,973 (68.3%) of those cited references in 6,618 journals representing 242 categories, which represents 94% of all WoS categories. Close to half of all citations were categorized as "education, scientific disciplines" and "healthcare sciences and services". Over the study period, the number of references consistently increased as did the representation of categories to include a diversity of topics such as business, management, and linguistics.

Discussion

Our study aligns with previous research, suggesting that medical education research could be described as inwardly focused. However, the observed growth of categories and their increasing diversity over time indicates that medical education displays increasing interdisciplinarity. Now visible, the field can raise awareness of and promote interdisciplinarity, if desired, by seeking and highlighting opportunities for future growth.

The voices of medical education scholarship: Describing the published landscape

INTRODUCTION

The voices of authors who publish medical education literature have a powerful impact on the field's discourses. Researchers have identified a lack of author diversity, which suggests potential epistemic injustice. This study investigates author characteristics to provide an evidence-based starting point for communal discussion with the intent to move medical education towards a future that holds space for, and values, diverse ways of knowing.

METHOD

The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis of all articles published in 24 medical education journals published between 2000 and 2020 to identify author characteristics, with an emphasis on author gender and geographic location and their intersection. Article metadata was downloaded from Web of Science. Genderize.io was used to predict author gender.

RESULTS

The journals published 37 263 articles authored by 62 708 unique authors. Males were more prevalent across all authorship positions (n = 62 828; 55.7%) than females (n = 49 975; 44.3%). Authors listed affiliations in 146 countries of which 95 were classified as Global South. Few articles were written by multinational teams (n = 3765; 16.2%). Global South authors accounted for 12 007 (11.4%) author positions of which 3594 (3.8%) were female.

DISCUSSION

This study provides an evidence-based starting point to discuss the imbalance of author voices in medical education, especially when considering the intersection of gender and geographical location, which further suggests epistemic injustice in medical education. If the field values a diversity of perspectives, there is considerable opportunity for improvement by engaging the community in discussions about what knowledge matters in medical education, the role of journals in promoting diversity, how to best use this baseline data and how to continue studying epistemic injustice in medical education.

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

PURPOSE

To conduct a bibliometric case study of the journal Perspectives on Medical Education (PME) to provide insights into the journal's inner workings and to "take stock" of where PME is today, where it has been, and where it might go.

METHODS

Data, including bibliographic metadata, reviewer and author details, and downloads, were collected for manuscripts submitted to and published in PME from the journal's Editorial Manager and Web of Science. Gender of authors and reviewers was predicted using Genderize.io. To visualize and analyze collaboration patterns, citation relationships and term co-occurrence social network analyses (SNA) were conducted. VOSviewer was used to visualize the social network maps.

RESULTS

Between 2012-2019 PME received, on average, 260 manuscripts annually (range = 73-402). Submissions were received from authors in 81 countries with the majority in the United States (US), United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. PME published 518 manuscripts with authors based in 31 countries, the majority being in the Netherlands, US, and Canada. PME articles were downloaded 717,613 times (mean per document: 1388). In total 1201 (55% women) unique peer reviewers were invited and 649 (57% women) completed reviews; 1227 (49% women) unique authors published in PME. SNA revealed that PME authors were quite collaborative, with most authoring articles with others and only a minority (n = 57) acting as single authors.

DISCUSSION

This case study provides a glimpse into PME and offers evidence for PME's next steps. In the future, PME is committed to growing the journal thoughtfully; diversifying and educating editorial teams, authors, and reviewers, and liberating and sharing journal data.

Delineating the field of medical education: Bibliometric research approach(es)

BACKGROUND

The field of medical education remains poorly delineated such that there is no broad consensus of articles or journals that comprise 'the field'. This lack of consensus indicates a missed opportunity for researchers to generate insights about the field that could facilitate conducting bibliometric studies and other research designs (e.g., systematic reviews) and also enable individuals to identify themselves as 'medical education researchers'. Other fields have utilised bibliometric field delineation, which is the assigning of articles or journals to a certain field in an effort to define that field.

PROCESS

In this Research Approach, three bibliometric field delineation approaches-information retrieval, core journals, and journal co-citation-are introduced. For each approach, the authors describe attempts to apply it in medical education and identify related strengths and weaknesses. Based on co-citation, the authors propose the Medical Education Journal List 24 (MEJ-24), as a starting point for delineating medical education and invite the community to collaborate on improving and potentially expanding this list.

PEARLS

As a research approach, field delineation is complicated, and there is no clear best way to delineate the field of medical education. However, recent advances in information science provide potentially fruitful approaches to deal with the field's complexity. When considering these approaches, researchers should consider collaborating with bibliometricians. Bibliometric approaches rely on available metadata for articles and journals, which necessitates that researchers examine the metadata prior to analysis to understand its strengths and weaknesses, and to assess how this might affect data interpretation. While using bibliometric approaches for field delineation is valuable, it is important to remember that these techniques are only as good as the research team's interpretation of the data, which suggests that an expanded approach is needed to better delineate medical education, an approach that includes active discussion within the medical education community.

Transparency in peer review: Exploring the content and tone of reviewers' confidential comments to editors

Purpose

Recent calls to improve transparency in peer review have prompted examination of many aspects of the peer-review process. Peer-review systems often allow confidential comments to editors that could reduce transparency to authors, yet this option has escaped scrutiny. Our study explores 1) how reviewers use the confidential comments section and 2) alignment between comments to the editor and comments to authors with respect to content and tone.

Methods

Our dataset included 358 reviews of 168 manuscripts submitted between January 1, 2019 and August 24, 2020 to a health professions education journal with a single blind review process. We first identified reviews containing comments to the editor. Then, for the reviews with comments, we used procedures consistent with conventional and directed qualitative content analysis to develop a coding scheme and code comments for content, tone, and section of the manuscript. For reviews in which the reviewer recommended “reject,” we coded for alignment between reviewers’ comments to the editor and to authors. We report descriptive statistics.

Results

49% of reviews contained comments to the editor (n = 176). Most of these comments summarized the reviewers’ impression of the article (85%), which included explicit reference to their recommended decision (44%) and suitability for the journal (10%). The majority of comments addressed argument quality (56%) or research design/methods/data (51%). The tone of comments tended to be critical (40%) or constructive (34%). For the 86 reviews recommending “reject,” the majority of comments to the editor contained content that also appeared in comments to the authors (80%); additional content tended to be irrelevant to the manuscript. Tone frequently aligned (91%).

Conclusion

Findings indicate variability in how reviewers use the confidential comments to editor section in online peer-review systems, though generally the way they use them suggests integrity and transparency to authors.

Scoping reviews in medical education: A scoping review

OBJECTIVES

Over the last two decades, the number of scoping reviews in core medical education journals has increased by 4200%. Despite this growth, research on scoping reviews provides limited information about their nature, including how they are conducted or why medical educators undertake this knowledge synthesis type. This gap makes it difficult to know where the field stands and may hamper attempts to improve the conduct, reporting and utility of scoping reviews. Thus, this review characterises the nature of medical education scoping reviews to identify areas for improvement and highlight future research opportunities.

METHOD

The authors searched PubMed for scoping reviews published between 1/1999 and 4/2020 in 14 medical education journals. The authors extracted and summarised key bibliometric data, the rationales given for conducting a scoping review, the research questions and key reporting elements as described in the PRISMA-ScR. Rationales and research questions were mapped to Arksey and O'Malley's reasons for conducting a scoping review.

RESULTS

One hundred and one scoping reviews were included. On average, 10.1 scoping reviews (SD = 13.1, median = 4) were published annually with the most reviews published in 2019 (n = 42). Authors described multiple reasons for undertaking scoping reviews; the most prevalent being to summarise and disseminate research findings (n = 77). In 11 reviews, the rationales for the scoping review and the research questions aligned. No review addressed all elements of the PRISMA-ScR, with few authors publishing a protocol (n = 2) or including stakeholders (n = 20). Authors identified shortcomings of scoping reviews, including lack of critical appraisal.

CONCLUSIONS

Scoping reviews are increasingly conducted in medical education and published by most core journals. Scoping reviews aim to map the depth and breadth of emerging topics; as such, they have the potential to play a critical role in the practice, policy and research of medical education. However, these results suggest improvements are needed for this role to be fully realised.

Knowledge syntheses in medical education: A bibliometric analysis

PURPOSE

This bibliometric analysis maps the landscape of knowledge syntheses in medical education. It provides scholars with a roadmap for understanding where the field has been and where it might go in the future, thereby informing research and educational practice. In particular, this analysis details the venues in which knowledge syntheses are published, the types of syntheses conducted, citation rates they produce, and altmetric attention they garner.

METHOD

In 2020, the authors conducted a bibliometric analysis of knowledge syntheses published in 14 core medical education journals from 1999 to 2019. To characterize the studies, metadata were extracted from PubMed, Web of Science, Altmetrics Explorer, and Unpaywall.

RESULTS

The authors analyzed 963 knowledge syntheses representing 3.1% of the total articles published (n = 30,597). On average, 45.9 knowledge syntheses were published annually (SD = 35.85, median = 33), and there was an overall 2620% increase in the number of knowledge syntheses published from 1999 to 2019. The journals each published, on average, a total of 68.8 knowledge syntheses (SD = 67.2, median = 41) with Medical Education publishing the most (n = 189; 19%). Twenty-one types of knowledge synthesis were identified, the most prevalent being systematic reviews (n = 341; 35.4%) and scoping reviews (n = 88; 9.1%). Knowledge syntheses were cited an average of 53.80 times (SD = 107.12, median = 19) and received a mean Altmetric Attention Score of 14.12 (SD = 37.59, median = 6).

CONCLUSIONS

There has been considerable growth in knowledge syntheses in medical education over the past 20 years, contributing to medical education's evidence base. Beyond this increase in volume, researchers have introduced methodological diversity in these publications, and the community has taken to social media to share knowledge syntheses. Implications for the field, including the impact of synthesis types and their relationship to knowledge translation, are discussed.

Integrating Wikipedia editing into health professions education: a curricular inventory and review of the literature

INTRODUCTION

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia read by millions seeking medical information. To provide health professions students with skills to critically assess, edit, and improve Wikipedia's medical content, a skillset aligned with evidence-based medicine (EBM), Wikipedia courses have been integrated into health professions schools' curriculum. This literature review and curricular inventory of Wikipedia educational initiatives provides an overview of current approaches and identifies directions for future initiatives and research.

METHODS

Five databases were searched for articles describing educational interventions to train health professional students to edit Wikipedia. Course dashboards, maintained by Wiki Education (Wiki Edu), were searched for curricular materials. From these sources, key details were extracted and synthesized, including student and instructor type, course content, educational methods, and student outcomes.

RESULTS

Six articles and 27 dashboards reported courses offered between 2015 and 2019. Courses were predominantly offered to medical and nursing students. Instructors delivered content via videos, live lectures, and online interactive modules. Course content included logistics of Wikipedia editing, EBM skills, and health literacy. All courses included assignments requiring students to edit Wikipedia independently or in groups. Limited details on assessment of student learning were available.

DISCUSSION

A small but growing number of schools are training health professions education students to improve Wikipedia's medical content. Course details are available on Wiki Edu dashboards and, to a lesser extent, in peer-reviewed publications. While more needs to be done in conducting and sharing assessment of student learning, integrating Wikipedia into health professions education has potential to facilitate learning of EBM and communication skills, improve Wikipedia's online content, and engage students with an autonomous environment while learning. Future considerations should include a thorough assessment of student learning and practices, a final review of student edits to ensure they follow Wikipedia's guidelines and are written in clear language, and improved sharing of teaching resources by instructors.

Analysis of lawsuits related to diagnostic errors from point-of-care ultrasound in internal medicine, paediatrics, family medicine and critical care in the USA

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study is to identify the extent of diagnostic error lawsuits related to point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in internal medicine, paediatrics, family medicine and critical care, of which little is known.

METHODS

We conducted a retrospective review of the Westlaw legal database for indexed state and federal lawsuits involving the diagnostic use of POCUS in internal medicine, paediatrics, family medicine and critical care. Retrieved cases were reviewed independently by three physicians to identify cases relevant to our study objective. A lawyer secondarily reviewed any cases with discrepancies between the three reviewers.

RESULTS

Our search criteria returned 131 total cases. Ultrasound was mentioned in relation to the lawsuit claim in 70 of the cases returned. In these cases, the majority were formal ultrasounds performed and reviewed by the radiology department, echocardiography studies performed by cardiologists or obstetrical ultrasounds. There were no cases of internal medicine, paediatrics, family medicine or critical care physicians being subjected to adverse legal action for their diagnostic use of POCUS.

CONCLUSION

Our results suggest that concerns regarding the potential for lawsuits related to POCUS in the fields of internal medicine, paediatrics, family medicine and critical care are not substantiated by indexed state and federal filed lawsuits.

Inconsistency of auditory middle latency and steady-state responses in infants

Auditory middle latency and steady-state responses (MLR/SSRs) were recorded in normal infants (aged 3 weeks to 28 months) and adults. SSR amplitudes were maximum using stimulus presentation rates near 40 Hz in adults. By contrast, the infant data showed no consistent amplitude maximum across the rates tested (9-59 Hz). With the exception of the brain-stem response wave V to MLR Na deflection, MLR components in infants' responses to 10.85 Hz clicks did not show any consistent pattern. To investigate the hypothesis that the 40 Hz SSR is derived from overlapping of the 10 Hz MLR components, 43.4 Hz SSRs were synthesized from the responses recorded at 10.85 Hz and compared with those recorded at 43.4 Hz. The predictive accuracy of the synthesized 43.4 Hz SSRs was significantly better in adults than in infants. The results of these studies indicate the presence of large age-related differences in the auditory MLR and SSR, and in the relationship between the two responses.

Rabies in Ireland: a precarious freedom

The prolonged freedom from rabies enjoyed by Ireland is based on both its island location and the rigid enforcement of national legislation. The yachting tourist and the increased level of shipping activity in ports and harbours are a major threat of disease introduction. Mass media publicity and public awareness are the main safeguards necessary to protect the freedom of our island.