Publication requirement for faculty promotion in medical institutions in India: ‘Mind the gap’

Abstract

Background . We assessed the balance between the number of publications required by medical teachers and the publication space available in the Indian medical journals. Methods . The Medical Council of India (MCI) website, its guidelines and documents were searched and we extracted data on the number of medical colleges, undergraduate and postgraduate seats and faculty requirement. The required number of assistant professors and associate professors was calculated. The publication requirements were estimated according to MCI’s February 2020 guidelines. A publication which satisfied the above guidelines for promotion was counted as ‘eligible publication’. Indian medical journals indexed in any of the MCI-permitted databases were identified, and the number of eligible articles in them in 2019 was counted. Results . India has a total of 79 798 MBBS seats, 33 025 postgraduate seats and 4231 superspecialty seats in MCI-certified medical institutions and to teach them 35 285 assistant professors and 23 116 associate professors are required. Assuming that each publication could serve a maximum of 3 teachers, we will need approximately 50 696 eligible publications in the next 7 years. A search of applicable databases, identified 162 unique Indian medical journals of which 79 were indexed in PubMed/PubMed Central. Among the remaining 63 were indexed in DOAJ, 14 in EMBASE, 3 in Scopus and 3 were indexed only in WOSSCIE. These journals cumulatively published a total of 8508 eligible publications in 2019. Conclusion . The publication space in Indian medical journals is limited, thus there is a need to have a national medical repository such as MedRxiv to prevent publication in predatory journals.