US dermatology residency program rankings.

Unlike many other adult specialties, US News & World Report does not rank dermatology residency programs annually. We conducted a study to rank individual US dermatology residency programs based on set criteria. For each residency program, data from 2008 related to a number of factors were collected, including annual amount of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dermatology Foundation (DF) funding received; number of publications from full-time faculty members; number of faculty lectures given at 5 annual society meetings; and number of full-time faculty members who were on the editorial boards of 6 dermatology journals with the highest impact factors. Most of the data were obtained through extensive Internet searches, and missing data were obtained by contacting individual residency programs. The programs were ranked based on the prior factors according to a weighted ranking algorithm. A list of overall rankings also was created.