Numbers. Everybody loves them. We judge cricketers by the runs they accumulate, centuries they score, wickets they earn and the catches they grab. In sixties, a certain Kumar earned a sobriquet โJubilee Kumarโ because his almost every movie would end up running for as long as 25 weeks in theatres. And the charisma of Jeff Bezos, Bill gates and Warren Buffet is partly driven by the numbers- the billions of dollars they own!
Can we use numbers to assess the strengths of a medical school? How can we assess its research output? Could the number of the papers it publishes be a useful yardstick? I delved deep into the annals of MGIMS and created a database that captures all papers that are linked with MGIMS. Of note, the first paper, affiliated to MGIMS, came from Dr BC Harinathโin February 1971โwhen he looked at some esoteric proteins in human brains. PubMed (PMID: 5550090) lists that paper.
Over the five decades, MGIMS has published a little over 4100 research papers. These papers make interesting reading, not only because they helped the science grow, but also because they make one realize the labour pains these researchers endured when they wrote these papers.
Here is a graph that shows how research at MGIMS grew over the five decades.
