Where Scholarship Falls Short: Assessing Scholarly Productivity in Emergency Medicine Residency Training

Background: Scholarship is a requirement for Emergency Medicine (EM) residency training. However, there is limited understanding of the rigor and degree to which scholarly requirements are completed by EM residents. The objective of this study was to measure the proportion of residents that met the standards delineated by a newly-proposed rubric for EM resident scholarship assessment. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of eight diverse EM residency programs. Each program collected data from their residents graduating in 2024 and assessed their scholarly project completion. The assessment utilized a previously-published rubric that evaluates the rigor of a resident's scholarly project based on six criteria: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, verifiable results, presentation/dissemination, and reflective critique. Data were de-identified and combined to report the overall rates across programs. Results: A total of 114 residents participated in the study (96.6%), of which 59 residents (52%) fulfilled all of the rubric-defined standards for resident scholarship. Of the six standards, setting clear goals (performed by 61%) and obtaining reflective critique (performed by 71%) proved most difficult to attain. Adequate preparation was done by 84%, methodology by 77%, results by 83%, and presentation by 99%. The median number of projects to fulfill all standards was one (IQR 0). Of the graduates in the eight programs, 45 (39%) presented an abstract at a conference and 31 (31%) published manuscripts during residency. Conclusion: We demonstrated that 48% of graduating residents in this pilot study did not complete the scholarship requirement as assessed by the rubric. This study highlights the need for clearly defined standards and highlights that the increased use of predefined standards for scholarship may enhance the educational value of this graduation requirement for EM residents.