Publication Count of Matched Dermatology Applicants Reported in Literature: A Systematic Review

Abstract BACKGROUND Competitive medical residency specialties, such as Dermatology, have historically placed lofty demands on applicants. We focus on the ever-increasing demands on applicants to publish, as well as discuss and quantify the delivery of these expectations in literature. OBJECTIVE To systematically review evidence regarding the number of publications possessed by successful applicants to a dermatology residency program. METHODS A systematic review of the literature was conducted between April and May 2023. PubMed, Google Scholar, and OVID were with no lower limit of the year. Our summary included 41 publications that specifically cited the number of publications by NRMP applicants successfully matching to US dermatology programs. We extracted additional applicant details (demographics, publication type) as available. RESULTS We found two major categories of cumulative publications reported in the literature: NRMP scholarly works and peer-reviewed indexed publications. Summarizing reports from 21 papers between 2011 and 2022, NRMP showed the overall mean amongst matched applicants to be 14.77 publications, with an upward trend over time. Throughout the literature, the mean was 3.23 peer-reviewed indexed publications for successful dermatology applicants. CONCLUSION Multiple studies cited and reported NRMP scholarly work numbers as “publications'', potentially contributing to discrepancies in the literature. NRMP encompasses other research endeavors in addition to peer-reviewed indexed publications in publication count. In the future, there should be greater clarification when defining and quantifying the publications of a successful dermatology applicant.