Background Facilitation of residents’ scholarly activities is certainly indispensable to the future of medical specialties. who were on the residency ranking list during the same AYs and could have been matched with our program had they ranked it high enough on their list. Results The Post-initiative group showed greater resident research involvement compared to the Pre-initiative group (89.2% [58 in 65 residents] vs. 64.8% [35 in 54] p=0.0013) and greater faculty involvement (23.9% [161 in 673 faculty/year] vs. 9.2% [55 in 595] p<0.0001). Choice of academic practice did not increase (50.8% [Post] vs. 40.7% [Pre] p=0.36). Graduated residents (n=38) published more often than the rank-to-match residents (n=220) (55.3% [21 residents] vs. Rabbit Polyclonal to P2RY8. 13.2% [29] p<0.0001 odds ratio 8.1 with 95% confidence interval of 3.9 to 17.2). Conclusions Research education initiatives increased residents’ research involvement. INTRODUCTION Research is indispensable to the future growth of anesthesiology. Research training of resident physicians will lay the foundation for the development of future clinician scientists.1 2 More fundamentally providing all anesthesiology residents with educational opportunities in the form of scholarly activities is a key responsibility for any anesthesiology program to nurture the next generation of academic anesthesiology faculty members. Indeed the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Anesthesiology Residency Review Committee recently reported that lack of faculty scholarly activity was the second biggest reason for citations in their 2012 program review.? Despite the Anesthesiology Residency Review Committee’s§ emphasis on residents’ research and scholarly activities methods to achieve this goal have not been fully established. Resulting outcomes of these initiatives have scarcely been reported in the field of anesthesiology.3 This is an concerning contrast to other medical specialties in which a number MS436 of resident research initiatives have been reported including internal medicine 4 family medicine 14 radiology 21 emergency medicine 24 25 pediatrics 26 27 psychiatry 28 29 rehabilitation medicine 30 orthopedics 31 general surgery 32 and urology.33 We MS436 hypothesized that implementing structured initiatives to promote resident research in an anesthesiology department would: 1) increase anesthesiology residents’ participation in research 2 improve residents’ research productivity and 3) MS436 facilitate faculty members’ involvement in resident research. Evaluation of the effectiveness of any education initiative which could affect the entire residency program and even the culture of the department is often difficult MS436 due to the lack of an appropriate control group.34 In this study the effectiveness of education initiatives was evaluated not only by evaluating the historical resident class cohort in the department but also by assessing the rank-to-match population as a control group.12 MATERIALS AND METHODS The University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the study as an exemption (IRB.