Background: Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color (BIPOC), other underrepresented minority (URM) individuals, and women have been historically underrepresented in scholarly writing and research. Junior faculty members may face similar experiential, psychological, and logistical barriers to scholarly participation. We sought interventions to improve hospitalists’ scholarly writing production, specifically those tailored for women, BIPOC, and other underrepresented minority individuals in academic hospital medicine.
Methods: We performed a literature search of PubMed, as well as hospital medicine specialty journals. We used a wide variety of search terms and permutations including “academic medicine,” “medical,” “faculty development,” “interventions,” “writing,” “scholarly writing,” “women,” “junior,” “minority,” and “under-represented” and “underrepresented.” For papers that seemed highly relevant upon title review, we searched PubMed’s “Similar Articles” and “Cited By” lists until we reached a point of saturation where most such items were ones that we had included in the search. We performed a title review and exported 358 potentially relevant papers into an EndNote database. We then performed a review of abstracts and applied inclusion criteria: papers published in English, interventions that took place in North America, that referenced hospitalists and/or academic hospital or internal medicine, and that focused at least in part on scholarly writing. Exclusion criteria included items focused on writing multiple-choice questions or curricula, for undergraduates/medical students/PhDs only, were exclusive to other medical specialties/professions (e.g., nursing, pharmacy), solely discussed mentorship, did not describe interventions, or focused on pediatric hospital medicine.
Results: After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, we found 8 writing interventions specific to non-pediatric hospitalists. Three papers focused on scholarly writing interventions appropriate for the early-career target audience: 1 was a review of a series of interventions to improve resident scholarly productivity and 2 described workshops (1 for empathetic writing and 1 for case reports). No scholarly writing interventions specifically for women, BIPOC, and other URiM individuals in hospital medicine were found in the literature.
Conclusions: There are many calls to increase participation in hospital medicine scholarship by members of historically underrepresented groups, but we found no specific strategies tailored for BIPOC and URiM individuals or women. Few formal strategies to increase writing capacity within academic hospital medicine programs that meet the unique needs of these populations—structural, psychological, logistical—have been rigorously studied, and most efforts to date have been included as part of broader mentoring initiatives rather than focused interventions. Future efforts can incorporate environmental scans to look for similar efforts emerging from industry or professional groups rather than academic institutions and incorporate best practices and lessons learned. Supporting junior, women, and BIPOC/URM faculty as they develop skills to conduct research and communicate their work is a key part of expanding institutions’ research footprint and will advance health equity among faculty and the patients and populations they treat, and inform the field of medicine more broadly.