The Role of Residency Accreditation Program Requirements on Scholarly Activity in Family Medicine

Background: Residency program requirements in Family Medicine have long required scholarship of both faculty and residents as part of instilling a culture of discovery and inquiry, but the impact of the requirements on faculty and residency scholarship is unclear. Methods: We gathered information on family medicine faculty scholarly activity between the years 2016 to 2021 from data routinely collected by the ACGME, including faculty presentations, faculty publications, and program citations for scholarship. We compared these data with dates corresponding to the development of ACGME requirements for scholarly activity to search for possible correlations. Results: Peer reviewed publications, other publications and presentations increased substantially over the time studied, and this increase seems to be out of proportion to the growth in the number of programs and faculty and occurred at the same time as shifts in residency requirements. PubMed articles increased from 505 to 3617; conference presentations increased from 4673 to 13842; and the ratio of PMID publications per faculty has increased from 0.03 to 0.21 between 2016 and 2021. Discussion: The shift of scholarship requirements from a “detail” to a “core” requirement, along with increasing specification of expectations may have contributed to growth in scholarly activity in family medicine residency programs. Strategy for building research capacity in the specialty should include attention to the content of residency training.