title: Can a resident's publication record predict fellowship publications?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Internal medicine fellowship programs have an incentive to select fellows who will ultimately publish. Whether an applicant's publication record predicts long term publishing remains unknown.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using records of fellowship bound internal medicine residents, we analyzed whether publications at time of fellowship application predict publications more than 3 years (2 years into fellowship) and up to 7 years after fellowship match. We calculate the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values and likelihood ratios for every cutoff number of application publications, and plot a receiver operator characteristic curve of this test.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Of 307 fellowship bound residents, 126 (41%) published at least one article 3 to 7 years after matching, and 181 (59%) of residents do not publish in this time period. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve is 0.59. No cutoff value for application publications possessed adequate test characteristics.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The number of publications an applicant has at time of fellowship application is a poor predictor of who publishes in the long term. These findings do not validate the practice of using application publications as a tool for selecting fellows.
authors.affiliation: Medical Oncology Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Vinay
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Prasad
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University, Department of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rho
authors.affiliation: Brigham and Women's Hospital, Department of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Senthil
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Selvaraj
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University, Department of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.
authors.forename: Mike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.affiliation: Yale University, Department of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
authors.forename: Andrae
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vandross
authors.affiliation: University of Maryland, Department of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ho
mesh_terms: D005257:Fellowships and Scholarships; D005544:Forecasting; D007388:Internal Medicine; D007396:Internship and Residency / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012106:Research / Q000639:trends*