Research trends in post-graduate medical students, Pune

Background: Scientific writings provide a link between production of knowledge and its use. They guide to plan for necessary improvements in treatment and prevention modalities. Inadequate and incomplete reporting of research studies weakens the medical literature. Aim: The aim of the study was bibliometric analysis of dissertations submitted by medical post-graduate (PGs) students. Material and Methods: It was a cross-sectional record based study carried out at one of the medical colleges at Pune. All the dissertations including observational studies submitted by PGs were analyzed using a pre-tested, structured assessment tool with strengthening the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology (STROBE) as the reference from 1 (st) March 2009 until 30 (th) March 2011. Data was compiled in excel sheet and it was imported into. SPSS 15 software (Statistical package for the social sciences, manufactured by IBM, Chicago Illinois in November 2006) for further analysis. Results: A total of 220 dissertations were analyzed in the present study. Nearly 73.18% (161/220) of dissertations were from clinical subjects, 15% (33/220) were from para-clinical and 11.8% (26/220) were from pre-clinical subjects. The majority of dissertations reported findings incompletely and inadequately without uniformity. Conclusion: PGs should be more vigilant in reporting their research in dissertations to increase their usefulness. They should adopt tools like STROBE, etc., to report data to create more uniformity in reporting. Adoption of such guidelines will also reduce chances of oversights and mistakes in reporting and dissertation writing.