Orthopaedic Journal Publications and Their Role in the Preparation for the Orthopaedic In-Training Examination

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been an effort to refocus on the efficacy of resident education practices. Much of this effort was summarized by a statement released in 1999 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which defined medical knowledge as one of six clinical care domains in which residents must receive instruction and show competency. Since then, there have been a number of subsequent reformations to residency training, such as the limitation of resident work hours to no more than eighty hours per week. Within the orthopaedic community, these changes have resulted in a tremendous interest in optimizing resident education. This interest is reflected in the literature by a near doubling in the number of studies concerning orthopaedic resident education and/or training in the past five years from 2004 to 2008 (n = 75) as compared with the preceding five years from 1999 to 2003 (n = 46) (Fig. 1). This interest served as one of the justifications for the present study as we attempted to understand the role of using the recent medical literature for the education and training of orthopaedic residents. Fig. 1 Line graph depicting the number of studies listed on PubMed related to orthopaedic resident education or training, stratified by year of publication. One of the tools that the orthopaedic community has established to evaluate resident training is the Orthopaedic In-Training Examination (OITE)1. The examination focuses on material supported by current scientific literature. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate what literature resources might be most beneficial for orthopaedic residents who are preparing for the OITE. The primary questions for the present study were: (1) What are the recommended references for the questions for each of the subject areas tested on the examination? (2) Do the subject areas tested correlate with …