Scholarly contributions of pharmacist educators in family medicine: A five-year review

Introduction and ObjectivesPharmacists are well established as clinician educators in family medicine training programs. Little data are available regarding their scholarly contributions within these roles. The objective of this project was to quantify the scholarly contributions, through authorship and conference presentations, by pharmacists in family medicine through a review of current North American literature and conferences.MethodsA retrospective review of scholarly contributions by pharmacists evaluated publications in eight family medicine journals and presentations at four major family medicine conferences from January 1, 2010-December 31, 2014. Data collected about the pharmacist authors and presenters included geographic location, affiliation, and credentials. For each scholarly work, primary authorship and type of interprofessional collaboration were evaluated.ResultsThere were 418 unique pharmacists who produced 676 unique scholarly works during the study period. Pharmacist publications gradually increased from 2.5% to 4.4% of all reviewed publications, while pharmacist presentations have remained more stagnant, fluctuating between 3.0% and 4.0% of all presentations over the study period. Of all scholarly works during this time period, pharmacists were involved as interprofessional collaborators in 75.6% of the publications and 82.4% of the presentations.ConclusionsPharmacist involvement in scholarly works has increased overall during the five-year study period, yet is a small subset of the overall scholarly works in family medicine. Uniquely, this data identifies pharmacists as scholars and interprofessional collaborators. Pharmacists' role in family medicine scholarship appears to be growing.