A quantitative study of research publications in the field of biochemistry education

Medical students perceive biochemistry, a subject taught in the first year of the medical curriculum in India, as being uninteresting and are often not motivated to study it. This warrants research to identify new and innovative strategies to teach biochemistry to medical students. However, very little is known about the quantity or quality of research being done in this field. In the present study, we have looked at research articles related to the field of biochemistry education published in scientific journals from 1948 to 2013. Research articles that were indexed with the medical subject heading (MeSH) term biochemistry education in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)'s MEDLINE database were extracted and analyzed. We analysed the number and type of articles published, country of origin, affiliations of the lead authors and the type of journals which published articles related to biochemistry education. We identified 575 articles published from 1948 to 2013 that matched the MeSH term used. This constitutes only 2.73 percent of all articles related to medical education published during this period. United States of America (USA) and United Kingdom (UK) had the highest number of publications (77 and 52 respectively). India, on the other hand, had 8 publications. These results reveal a gross lack of research in the field of biochemistry education. We conclude that there is a need for research in this field in order to identify new and innovative strategies in teaching the subject to medical students.