Letters : Determining Student-Faculty Ratios and Faculty Scholarship Levels/Rates

Abstract

To the Editor. The recent article by Benavides et al explored the correlation of faculty members' publication productivity to student-faculty ratios in colleges of pharmacy. These investigators also evaluated the influence of other factors, such as research funding, public vs. private university status, and supportive faculty members on scholarship. While these areas are important topics of investigation where additional insight would be welcomed, I would like to point out 2 potentially serious methodological errors in the study. These authors attempted to compile publication rates of colleges of pharmacy by searching PubMed. While there is insufficient detail in the article about how these searches were performed, it appears that the authors utilized the affiliation field of the MEDLINE database to search for individual schools and colleges. Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that the MEDLINE database lists only the address of the corresponding author, not all the authors of the paper. So in a multi-university collaborative paper with, for example, 6 authors, only the corresponding author's address will appear in the MEDLINE record. This is in contrast to a database such as Science Citation Index (Web of Science online) which captures the address of every author on a particular paper. This error would result in a significantly underestimated publication count for some colleges.