Leveraging Google Scholar to Facilitate Resident Research Reporting

Introduction The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires annual reporting of resident scholarly activities. However, this can be time-consuming for both residents and residency leadership and may not contain the most accurate or up-to-date information. This study sought to determine whether Google Scholar could adequately identify resident publications when compared with their ACGME self-report. Methods This was a cross-sectional study comparing resident Google Scholar publications with their ACGME self-reported data from 2018 to 2020. Manuscripts were only included if they were published prior to June 30, 2020, and while the participant was a resident at Rush University Medical Center. We did not count articles published prior to beginning residency. We independently collected data from the residents' self-report and Google Scholar profiles and compared the results. We assessed the overall concordance between data. When a discordant publication was identified, it was reviewed in full and discussed with the resident to ensure that it was correctly attributed to the resident. Data were presented primarily as descriptive statistics including percentages. Results Of 24 (96%) residents, 23 created Google Scholar profiles. There were 22 total publications. Google Scholar was concordant with self-report in 18 (78.3%) instances and discordant in five (21.7%) cases. In all five residents (n = 9 publications), the discordant publication was correctly identified by Google Scholar despite not being reported by the resident in their ACGME self-report. Conclusion We found that resident Google Scholar accounts resulted in the identification of publications that had not been previously reported on their ACGME self-report without missing any relevant publications.