Medical students’ scientific production in Lima, Peru, 2016

Cross-sectional study. The study population was graduates from all eight faculties of medicine located in the city of Lima (Peru) who attended their final year in 2016. We considered only the faculties of medicine that had at least one student attending the last year during 2016.Study sample were the graduates who took the National Examination Board (ENAM, in Spanish) in 2016. The ENAM is a test applied annually by the Peruvian Association of Faculties of Medicine (ASPEFAM, in Spanish) to students of medicine who are finishing the last year of studies. This exam is required to apply for residency and to apply for the Rural and Urban Marginal Health Service (which in turn allows physicians to work for the public sector in Peru).We obtained the list with the names of all the medical students from medical schools of Lima (Peru) that would take the ENAM in November 2016, from the ASPEFAM website (http://www.aspefam.org.pe/). This list is published on free access.During August 2018, systematic searches were conducted to find the scientific production of medical students. This search was done in Google Scholar and Pubmed. Google Scholar is considered the search engine that includes the largest amount of biomedical literature available on the Internet.To build the search strategy terms, we used all possible combinations of the names and surnames (paternal and paternal-maternal) of each student, adding the terms [Peru] or [Lima] for separate. This strategy was used in previous studies. Subsequently, we reviewed each paper manually to avoid the inclusion of possible cases of homonymy.Two researchers carried out, independently, the systematic search and manual review of the publications of each medical student. Finally, a third researcher performed a quality control by comparing the parallel databases to resolve the discordant cases. We considered as a scientific publication any paper published in a scientific journal. Books, technical reports, theses, posters, or scientific congresses abstracts were excluded.We collected the variables taking into account two different units of analysis: medical students and papers.Medical students’ variables: For each medical student, the following variables were collected: gender (male or female), university in which he/she coursed his/her undergraduate studies, have published at least one paper in a scientific journal (yes or no), have published at least one original paper in a scientific journal (yes or no), have published at least one original paper in a scientific journal indexed in Pubmed (yes or no), and year of first publication. It was considered as an "original" paper if it had the following sections: introduction, methods, results, and discussion; or its equivalents. All the papers published up to 2016 were registered (according to the year corresponding to the volume of the journal).Papers’ variables: For each paper, the following variables were collected: name and country of the journal in which it was published (Peru, Latin-American, others), language of the paper (Spanish, English, Spanish and English) year to which the volume of the journal corresponded, type of article (original, letter to the editor, clinical case, others), if the paper was indexed in Pubmed (yes or no), if the paper had a medical student as first author (yes or no), and if the paper had a medical student as the corresponding author (yes or no).Contact to use the data to: Percy Mayta-Tristan; [e-mail]