Can a Resident's Publication Record Predict Fellowship Publications?

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bound residents, 126 (41%) published at least one article 3 to 7 years after matching, and 181 (59%) of residents do not publish in this time period.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. CONCLUSION 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.