How to increase scholarly engagement?

[MediMike]

Was just virtually thumbing through the Society of Critical Care Medicine's educational program, and looking at the presenters the vast majority were MDs, followed by NPs, PharmD and RRT...One PA.  There was a SINGLE PA out of a multiday conference series.  This has held true in other conferences, seminars and boot camps I have attended.

Any thoughts on why this is? I again feel that while our diversity of prior lives before PA school makes our profession fairly strong it also leads to a significant degree of de-cohesiveness.  Similar to our lack of engagement in political actions and advocacy we just aren't seeing PAs publishing, researching and presenting.

Any thoughts on how to fix this?

[iconic]

PA profession for whatever reason is opposed to scholarly work and moving to a Doctoral degree. We are the last of Mohicans, it also doesn’t help that we don’t have much to show for all of our supposedly superior training. 
 

It is also very true in the Psych world. There are NPs who present at conferences for physicians 

Edited February 2, 2021 by iconic

[rev ronin]

I think this will continue to change as we recruit 4.0'ers instead of battle-hardened corpsmen. Looking through some doctoral curricula, it looks like they're aiming to teach most PA doctorate holders to be able to write a credible paper, and that's often an entry point into educating others. I know that I'm now, 8 years in, actually looking at finding time to go back and do research on patient care topics that interest me; I was working through how to set up a mental health survey for my local fire/EMS system when Covid hit.  I have about 3-4 project ideas for a doctoral capstone... now I just need to find the time to do and publish them.

Oh, also? Not really having a faculty mentor after graduation to collaborate with definitely slowed/stunted the time between graduation and my first JAAPA publication.

[MediMike]

8 hours ago, rev ronin said:

I think this will continue to change as we recruit 4.0'ers instead of battle-hardened corpsmen. Looking through some doctoral curricula, it looks like they're aiming to teach most PA doctorate holders to be able to write a credible paper, and that's often an entry point into educating others. I know that I'm now, 8 years in, actually looking at finding time to go back and do research on patient care topics that interest me; I was working through how to set up a mental health survey for my local fire/EMS system when Covid hit.  I have about 3-4 project ideas for a doctoral capstone... now I just need to find the time to do and publish them.

Oh, also? Not really having a faculty mentor after graduation to collaborate with definitely slowed/stunted the time between graduation and my first JAAPA publication.

Have you looked at the process to formally validate a survey? Crap on a crutch. It's ridiculous.

Totally agree, getting articles published in JAAPA was rough, and not to downplay our trade journal too much... but it's not like it has a massive impact factor.

[rev ronin]

6 hours ago, MediMike said:

Totally agree, getting articles published in JAAPA was rough, and not to downplay our trade journal too much... but it's not like it has a massive impact factor.

Yeah, and it's not necessarily internally referential, either.  Someone wrote a nice article on vaccine refusal, focusing on more of the statistics and science rather than mine which was about how to talk with folks.  Did my article from this time last year get cited? Nope, but multiple (I think... I haven't counted) of the same references I used did.