Academic Medicine
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Lippincott Williams and Wilkins Ltd. (US) |
| ISSN | 1040-2446 / 1938-808X |
| Scopus | 26493 |
| Wikidata | Q15751327 |
| OpenAlex | S19793444 |
| Website | http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/pages/default.aspx |
| Total publications | 2.382 |
| Coverage period | 1938 - 2025 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Impact factor | 0.565 |
| SJR | 1.42 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 2.029 |
| CiteScore | 6.8 |
| Female authorship share | 59.8% |
This journal focuses on academic medicine, covering medical education, health policy, and healthcare delivery. Despite medical anthropology being a relevant subfield, this venue's content is primarily clinical and administrative, placing it outside the scope of social anthropology
Education · Medicine (miscellaneous) · Advances in Oncology and Radiotherapy · Child and Adolescent Health · Clinical Reasoning and Diagnostic Skills · Cultural Competency in Health Care · Dental Education, Practice, Research · Diversity and Career in Medicine · Empathy and Medical Education
The 2025 Rime Foreword
Medical education scholars, particularly those early in their careers, frequently encounter challenges in integrating theory into their research, a common point of feedback from peer review processes such as the Research in Medical Education (RIME) series. Theory, defined as interconnected ideas or principles, offers a structured lens to understand complex educational phenomena. It helps organize existing knowledge, predict outcomes, and explain …
Helping Medical Education Faculty Navigate a Post-Academic Landing Pad
Vicarious Trauma and Medical Student Engagement
Core Competencies for Students Entering Medical School
A socially accountable physician workforce must include disabled learners and providers. However, current Canadian Technical Standards (TS) for medical school admissions create barriers to their inclusion. These standards overlook advances in assistive technology, universal design, evolving inclusion practices, and legal protections. Replacing the TS required consensus, but traditional methods of achieving consensus on disability inclusion risk r…
Medical Schools and Their Universities and Health Systems
Snooze Control
Defining a Supportive Teaching Climate for Clinical Supervisors in Residency Training
In Remembrance of Holly J. Humphrey MD, Macp
In Anticipation of the 100th Anniversary of Academic Medicine and Exciting Changes in 2026
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this editorial do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the AAMC or its members. The field of academic medicine is inherently forward looking—educating a new generation of health professionals and scientists, engaging in research to understand disease and health and to develop novel therapies, strengthening clinical services, advancing community collaborations, and nurturing leaders. We who are involved …
Three Good Questions for Faculty and Their Mentors in Support of Academic Career Development
Faculty mentorship is essential for a successful career in academic medicine, and effective support includes a commitment between a faculty member and mentor to navigate through competing interests and priorities. Many faculty mentorship programs have been described. However, the program content, including guidance tools and guiding questions, is less often defined. To address this gap, the authors draw on their faculty mentor-mentee experience i…
Mentoring and Partnerships for Health Equity Research
Implementation of a Policy for Accommodations for Physicians With Disabilities
Although physicians with disabilities are underrepresented in medicine, their lived experiences of disability can increase empathy for patients, enrich the learning environment, and improve working conditions. However, they face barriers related to procedures, policies, clinical accommodations, disability and wellness support services, and physical environments as well as cultural barriers that affect their meaningful inclusion and ability to wor…
A Practical Approach to Quality Improvement Education for New Educators
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s mandate for quality improvement (QI) training in residency programs has generated discussion in the literature of QI best practices and curriculum models. Despite this requirement, residents continue to report limited exposure to domains like available QI expertise, access to data collection, QI knowledge, and ability to complete all project stages. While the barriers to successful QI pro…
A Novel Competency-Based, Time-Variable Mid-Career Fellowship Program in Hospice and Palliative Medicine
Studying the Role of Medicine in Nazism and the Holocaust to Shape Professional Identity Formation
Rethinking Milestone Validity in Graduate Medical Education
Efforts in Undergraduate Medical Education to Improve Socioeconomic Status Diversity
“Having Support at Work ‘Is Different’ and Important”
Financial Barriers to Rural Graduate Medical Education
In Reply to Maurana and Wood Ion
Academic Medical Centers Must Lead in Firearm Injury Prevention Education
A Dedicated Graduate Certificate in Health Equity
U.S. Medical School Graduates’ Placement in Graduate Medical Education
In Reply to Perry et al
From Launch to Leadership
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this editorial do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the AAMC or its members. Navigating an academic career path, from launch to leadership, is often an ongoing focus for members of the academic medicine community at all career stages. Getting established and translating one’s excellence in education, science, clinical care, and community mission areas to academic promotion are crucial steps for early…
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The Hmong people have a saying, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means, “to speak of all kinds of things.” These few words characterize a highly complex, elaborate worldview shared by the Hmong: Everything in the world is connected, no event occurs in isolation from others, and “you can miss a lot by sticking to the point.” As we began to write this commentary, we discovered that these beliefs about how the world operates characterize not only Hmo…
Shifting Paradigms
Realizing medical education is on the brink of a major paradigm shift from structure- and process-based to competency-based education and measurement of outcomes, the authors reviewed the existing medical literature to provide practical insight into how to accomplish full implementation and evaluation of this new paradigm. They searched Medline and the Educational Resource Information Clearinghouse from the 1960s until the present, reviewed the t…
Increasing Womenʼs Leadership in Academic Medicine
The AAMC's Increasing Women's Leadership Project Implementation Committee examined four years of data on the advancement of women in academic medicine. With women comprising only 14% of tenured faculty and 12% of full professors, the committee concludes that the progress achieved is inadequate. Because academic medicine needs all the leaders it can develop to address accelerating institutional and societal needs, the waste of most women's potenti…
Cross-cultural Medical Education
Given that understanding the sociocultural dimensions underlying a patient's health values, beliefs, and behaviors is critical to a successful clinical encounter, cross-cultural curricula have been incorporated into undergraduate medical education. The goal of these curricula is to prepare students to care for patients from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and to recognize and appropriately address racial, cultural, and gender biases in h…
Confronting “Culture” in Medicineʼs “Culture of No Culture”
The author presents reflections from medical anthropology on the institutional culture of medicine and medical education, which sees itself as a "culture of no culture" and which systematically tends to foster static and essentialist conceptions of "culture" as applied to patients. Even though requirements designed to address cultural competence are increasingly incorporated into medical school curricula, medical students as a group may be forgiv…
Personal Illness Narratives
Reflective writing is one established method for teaching medical students empathetic interactions with patients. Most such exercises rely on students' reflecting upon clinical experiences. To effectively elicit, interpret, and translate the patient's story, however, a reflective practitioner must also be self-aware, personally and professionally. Race, gender, and other embodied sources of identity of practitioners and patients have been shown t…
Deliberate Practice and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Expert Performance in Medicine and Related Domains
The factors that cause large individual differences in professional achievement are only partially understood. Nobody becomes an outstanding professional without experience, but extensive experience does not invariably lead people to become experts. When individuals are first introduced to a professional domain after completing their education, they are often overwhelmed and rely on help from others to accomplish their responsibilities. After mon…
Health Disparities Based on Socioeconomic Inequities
Health is unevenly distributed across socioeconomic status. Persons of lower income, education, or occupational status experience worse health and die earlier than do their better-off counterparts. This article discusses these disparities in the context of urban medical practice. The article begins with a discussion of the complex relationship among socioeconomic status, race, and health in the United States. It highlights the effects of institut…
Generation X
Differences and tensions between the Baby Boom generation (born 1945-1962) and Generation X (born 1963-1981) have profound implications for the future of academic medicine. By and large, department heads and senior faculty are Boomers; today's residents and junior faculty are Generation X'ers. Looking at these issues in terms of the generations involved offers insights into a number of faculty development challenges, including inadequate and inex…
The Impact of E-Learning in Medical Education
The authors provide an introduction to e-learning and its role in medical education by outlining key terms, the components of e-learning, the evidence for its effectiveness, faculty development needs for implementation, evaluation strategies for e-learning and its technology, and how e-learning might be considered evidence of academic scholarship. E-learning is the use of Internet technologies to enhance knowledge and performance. E-learning tech…
Viewpoint
The introduction of competency-based postgraduate medical training, as recently stimulated by national governing bodies in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and other countries, is a major advancement, but at the same time it evokes critical issues of curricular implementation. A source of concern is the translation of general competencies into the practice of clinical teaching. The authors observe confusion around t…
Beyond Cultural Competence
In response to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education mandate that medical education must address both the needs of an increasingly diverse society and disparities in health care, medical schools have implemented a wide variety of programs in cultural competency. The authors critically analyze the concept of cultural competency and propose that multicultural education must go beyond the traditional notions of "competency" (i.e., knowledge, sk…
The Devil is in the Third Year
PURPOSE: This longitudinal study was designed to examine changes in medical students' empathy during medical school and to determine when the most significant changes occur. METHOD: Four hundred fifty-six students who entered Jefferson Medical College in 2002 (n = 227) and 2004 (n = 229) completed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy at five different times: at entry into medical school on orientation day and subsequently at the end of each a…
Burnout and Serious Thoughts of Dropping Out of Medical School
PURPOSE: Little is known about students who seriously consider dropping out of medical school. The authors assessed the severity of thoughts of dropping out and explored the relationship of such thoughts with burnout and other indicators of distress. METHOD: The authors surveyed medical students attending five medical schools in 2006 and 2007 (prospective cohort) and included two additional medical schools in 2007 (cross-sectional cohort). The su…
Calls for Reform of Medical Education by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which in 1910 helped stimulate the transformation of North American medical education with the publication of the Flexner Report, has a venerated place in the history of American medical education. Within a decade following Flexner's report, a strong scientifically oriented and rigorous form of medical education became well established; its structures and processes have changed relatively l…
Physiciansʼ Empathy and Clinical Outcomes for Diabetic Patients
PURPOSE: To test the hypothesis that physicians' empathy is associated with positive clinical outcomes for diabetic patients. METHOD: A correlational study design was used in a university-affiliated outpatient setting. Participants were 891 diabetic patients, treated between July 2006 and June 2009, by 29 family physicians. Results of the most recent hemoglobin A1c and LDL-C tests were extracted from the patients' electronic records. The results …
Does Simulation-Based Medical Education With Deliberate Practice Yield Better Results Than Traditional Clinical Education? A Meta-Analytic Comparative Review of the Evidence
PURPOSE: This article presents a comparison of the effectiveness of traditional clinical education toward skill acquisition goals versus simulation-based medical education (SBME) with deliberate practice (DP). METHOD: This is a quantitative meta-analysis that spans 20 years, 1990 to 2010. A search strategy involving three literature databases, 12 search terms, and four inclusion criteria was used. Four authors independently retrieved and reviewed…
Competency Is Not Enough
Despite the widespread implementation of competency-based medical education, there are growing concerns that generally focus on the translation of physician roles into "measurable competencies." By breaking medical training into small, discrete, measurable tasks, it is argued, the medical education community may have emphasized too heavily questions of assessment, thereby missing the underlying meaning and interconnectedness of how physician role…
Teaching Empathy to Medical Students
PURPOSE: Some research shows that empathy declines during medical school. The authors conducted an updated, systematic review of the literature on empathy-enhancing educational interventions in undergraduate medical education. METHOD: The authors searched PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science (January 1, 2004 through March 19, 2012) using key words related to undergraduate medical education and empathy. They independently s…
The Flipped Classroom
Recent calls for educational reform highlight ongoing concerns about the ability of current curricula to equip aspiring health care professionals with the skills for success. Whereas a wide range of proposed solutions attempt to address apparent deficiencies in current educational models, a growing body of literature consistently points to the need to rethink the traditional in-class, lecture-based course model. One such proposal is the flipped c…
Burnout Among U.S. Medical Students, Residents, and Early Career Physicians Relative to the General U.S. Population
PURPOSE: To compare the prevalence of burnout and other forms of distress across career stages and the experiences of trainees and early career (EC) physicians versus those of similarly aged college graduates pursuing other careers. METHOD: In 2011 and 2012, the authors conducted a national survey of medical students, residents/fellows, and EC physicians (≤ 5 years in practice) and of a probability-based sample of the general U.S. population. All…
The Prevalence of Medical Student Mistreatment and Its Association With Burnout
PURPOSE: Medical student mistreatment has been recognized for decades and is known to adversely impact students personally and professionally. Similarly, burnout has been shown to negatively impact students. This study assesses the prevalence of student mistreatment across multiple medical schools and characterizes the association between mistreatment and burnout. METHOD: In 2011, the authors surveyed a nation ally representative sample of third-…
Medical Student Mental Health 3.0
Medical education can have significant negative effects on the well-being of medical students. To date, efforts to improve student mental health have focused largely on improving access to mental health providers, reducing the stigma and other barriers to mental health treatment, and implementing ancillary wellness programs. Still, new and innovative models that build on these efforts by directly addressing the root causes of stress that lie with…
Reframing Medical Education to Support Professional Identity Formation
Teaching medical professionalism is a fundamental component of medical education. The objective is to ensure that students understand the nature of professionalism and its obligations and internalize the value system of the medical profession. The recent emergence of interest in the medical literature on professional identity formation gives reason to reexamine this objective. The unstated aim of teaching professionalism has been to ensure the de…
The Effect of an Intervention to Break the Gender Bias Habit for Faculty at One Institution
PURPOSE: Despite sincere commitment to egalitarian, meritocratic principles, subtle gender bias persists, constraining women's opportunities for academic advancement. The authors implemented a pair-matched, single-blind, cluster randomized, controlled study of a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention at a large public university. METHOD: Participants were faculty in 92 departments or divisions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Between Sept…