Future opportunities and challenges in academic anesthesia in the United Kingdom: a model for maintaining the scientific edge

Abstract

The review's main conclusions are: the creation of a central National Institute for Academic Anaesthesia to coordinate and implement academic strategy and funding; engaging with national pathways for the training of future academics; and suggestions for the future role for anesthetic specialist societies in academic strategy. These initiatives can radically transform the research environment in a positive way.

International publication trends originating from anaesthetic departments from 2001 to 2015

“…Thus, for some countries such as the UK, our study may have missed publications because many former anaesthetic departments have been renamed into more generally titled departments, such as ‘Surgical Sciences’, ‘Peri‐operative Medicine’, ‘Neuroscience’, etc. . Our statistic of adjusting for per million inhabitants makes the assumption that the number of scientifically active anaesthetists is itself proportional to the wider population but this may not be the case.…”

An analysis of scholarly productivity in United States academic anaesthesiologists by citation bibliometrics

“…The structure of US academic anaesthesiology departments is substantially different from those in the UK. In the US, departments are organised in a ‘vertical’ architecture, in contrast to the ‘horizontal’ design of UK National Health Service academic departments [16]. New faculty appointments are usually made at the assistant professor level (although some appointments are made at the lower instructor level for those who need to complete the American Board of Anesthesiology certification process).…”

“…Many departments and individuals both in the US and the UK are being increasingly judged on the basis of citation metrics [5, 15]. The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) uses measures of academic output when making decisions about the distribution of government funds to universities [16] and this approach may be responsible for the alarming decrease in scholarly productivity observed in UK anaesthesiologists over the past decade [17, 18]. In the US, academic anaesthesiologists face a similar crisis in declining productivity that has been linked to their inability to compete successfully for research grant money allocated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) [19].…”

H-index is a sensitive indicator of academic activity in highly productive anaesthesiologists: results of a bibliometric analysis

“…H ‐index has been used to quantify and compare productivity among faculty members in a variety of biological and medical sciences . H ‐index is proportional to academic rank, may be used as a factor when determining promotion, and is a determinant of allocation of government funds for research in the United Kingdom. The total academic activities of many departments and individuals in North America and Europe are being increasingly judged on the basis of citation metrics including h ‐index …”