ArticleCureus2023
Does Academic Productivity Correlate With Industry Payments in Hand Surgery Fellowship Programs in the United States?
Article in Cureus, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Analysis of the Distribution of Private Research Funding to Sports Medicine Orthopaedic Surgeons.Orthopaedic journal of sports medicine · 2025Article
- Exploring the relationship between industry payments and institutional factors among American shoulder and elbow surgery fellowship programs.JSES reviews, reports, and techniques · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundHand surgeons and the industry share a common goal to improve the care of patients. However, industry support remains controversial, and the current relationship with fellowship programs remains unclear. This study explores the relationship between industry support and research productivity among hand surgeons in the academic setting.
methodsThe Open Payments database, created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a result of the Sunshine Act, was used to identify supplemental income paid to physicians of hand surgery fellowships in the United States. Both lifetime individual physician and aggregated fellowship Sunshine Act supplemental income (2015-2021) were collected for review. Supplemental income only reflects royalties, consulting fees, or food and does not include direct research funding. H-index was collected through the Scopus website as a proxy for academic productivity.
resultsSix hundred and thirty-four faculty physicians (90.8%) from 94 hand surgery fellowships (100%) were included in the study. The mean individual physician lifetime supplemental income was $67,272 (median $341,861), whereas the mean individual physician H-index was 12.5 (median 9.0). There was a significant and weak positive correlation between individual physician H-index and lifetime income (p<0.001). Similarly, there was a significant and moderately positive correlation between the combined fellowship H-index and total lifetime income (p<0.001).
conclusionResearch productivity of an orthopedic hand fellowship group and individual academic hand surgeon correlate with overall industry support from indirect research funding. Further work is required to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of industry support of academically productive hand surgeons at hand surgery fellowships.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.