Many surgical departments in the US lack endocrine surgery faculty. While endocrine surgeons can provide worthwhile clinical services, it is unclear how they contribute to the overall academic mission of the department. The current study aims to evaluate the academic productivity of endocrine surgeons, as defined by American Association of Endocrine Surgery (AAES) membership, when compared to other academic surgical faculty.
Methods: An established database of 4,078 surgical department faculty was used for this study. This database includes surgical faculty of the top 50 NIH-funded universities as well as faculty from 5 outstanding hospital-based surgical departments. Academic metrics were obtained using publicly available data from websites, including Scopus, Grantome, and NIH RePORTER. AAES membership was determined using the online membership roster.
Results: A total of 101 AAES members were identified in this database, accounting for 2.7% of this population. Overall, endocrine surgeons outperformed other academic surgical faculty with respect to publications (66 ± 94 vs 28 ± 91, p < 0.001), citations (1430 ± 3432 vs 459 ± 2955, p = 0.007) and H-index (19 ± 18 vs 10 ± 13, p < 0.001). Regarding funding status, 32% of the AAES members had former/current NIH funding compared with 18.8% of other surgical faculty (p = 0.003).
Conclusion: Endocrine surgeons excelled with respect to publications, citations, and research funding compared to non-endocrine surgical faculty. These results demonstrate that endocrine surgeons can contribute enormously to the overall academic mission. More surgical departments in the US should consider establishing an endocrine surgery program.