How Many Work Hours Are Requisite to Publish a Manuscript?

A dvances in medicine are driven by propagation of research and dissemination of meaningful results from basic science, clinical, or translational studies. Although a randomized controlled trial has the highest power, this is not the most frequently conducted study method in surgery, as randomized trials are often not feasible due to disease infrequen-cy or an inability to conduct an ethically sound trial. In clinical research, the most prevalent study design is a retrospective case series. 1 Quantifying the hours spent on a retrospective study from idea genesis to manuscript publication is an important metric for clinicians, students/trainees, academic departments , and administrators in academic medical centers. It will allow appropriate allocation of funding for research-based activities, including human capital, research infrastructure, academic surgeon compensation, and for promotion/tenure purposes. Currently, there is an absence of a good metric in the literature quantifying the hours that go into publishing a retrospective study. Roland and Kirkpatrick 2 alluded to this question in 1975 but did not study it. This study aims to quantify work hours associated with publishing a manuscript with a retrospective study design. METHODS Following approval of University of British Colum-bia Children's and Women's research ethics board (H12-01664), 16 surgeons with 5 or more published retrospective studies identified via PubMed were selected to participate in this study; a survey was designed as the data collection tool. Careful screening for publications with a retrospective study design was identified on PubMed, based on the surgeon's name. Investigators were given a package with a separate survey data sheet for each individual published manuscript and were asked to estimate the hours spent by each member of the study team (principle investigator, coinvestigator, resident, research assistant , clinical research coordinator, medical student, and others) toward 8 components of the research cycle: study planning, literature review, ethics application , data collection, data analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript submission, and postsub-mission revision for each publication. Surveys returned with insufficient or incomplete data were excluded. Descriptive/summary statistics were used to analyze the data. RESULTS A total of 198 published retrospective studies were identified. Thirteen surgeons returned a total of 171 surveys (81% response rate) published over a 22-year span (1990–2012). The number of contributing authors ranged from 2 to 11, with the number of subjects ranging from 3 to 7071. Results revealed that a median of 177 hours was spent per publication (range, 29–1287). Neither the number of authors nor …