Education Patterns and Research Grant Success of Medical School Faculty

摘要

A retrospective study has investigated the influence of successive educational events on the quality of research proposals of medical school faculty as measured by NIH Study Section approvals and priority scores. The educational factor having the strongest positive association with research quality of M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s was postdoctoral training. Graduates of research intensive medical schools were more often successful in their first bid for research support than were graduates of less research intensive medical schools. For M.D.'s, residency experience at a hospital affiliated with a major research center was associated with more highly rated research grant applications. Residency experience at a hospital affiliated with a major research center was not positively related to the research outcome of M.D.-Ph.D's, and M.D.'s and M.D.-Ph.D.'s who had no residency training at all had the best research outcomes. For Ph.D. graduates, on the other hand, in addition to postdoctoral training, reputational ratings of their graduate departments was a strong predictor of the success of their research proposals. For both M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s the place from wich the application was made did not influence grant success beyond the extent already explained by educational differences. For M.D.-Ph.D's, the opposite was found: applications from major centers were more successful even after statistical adjustment for educational differences among individual applicants.