Introduction:Emergency medicine (EM) organizations such as the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and the Institute of Medicine have called for more clinical research as a way of addressing the scarcity of research in EM. Previous investigations have examined funding and productivity in EM research, but whether EM researchers preferentially concentrate on certain patient-related topics is not known. We hypothesized that at least part of the scarcity of EM research is from the tendency of EM researchers, like researchers in other fields, to focus on rarer conditions with higher morbidity or mortality instead of on more common conditions with less acuity. This study compared the frequency of specific medical conditions presenting to emergency departments nationwide with the frequency of emergency physician research on those same conditions.
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