Healthcare Crisis in Korea and Its Impact on Medical Research: A PubMed Analysis (2022–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1/4 https://jkms.orgIn response to the Korea government's 2024 policy to increase the number of medical students, a nationwide resignation of residents and prolonged leave by medical students have disrupted healthcare services and medical education systems. 1,2The response to the government's policies has disrupted medical treatment and education at teaching hospitals and medical schools, leading to significant challenges in the sustainability of medical research as well as the healthcare system.A recent paper reported that the Journal of Korean Medical Science revealed in 2024 that the proportion of publications and submissions by domestic authors is declining. 3,4However, this analysis was limited to a single journal, restricting its generalizability.To see the broader impact of this event, we checked the change from 2022 to 2024 in the proportion of articles in PubMed that included authors from affiliations in Korea to figure out how the current nationwide healthcare crisis affected medical research.PubMed's Application Programming Interface was used to count articles published from January 2022 to December 2024 according to the month of publication (Supplementary Method). 5 Affiliations containing 'Korea,' 'Republic of Korea,' or 'South Korea' were identified.Papers were categorized as: 1) Korea-domestic study, where all authors were affiliated with Korea institutions, and 2) Korea-international collaborative study, where only some authors were affiliated with Korea.In 2022 and 2023, a total of 1,494,958 and 1,419,360 papers were published, of which 31,873 and 30,642 (2.13% and 2.10%) were Korea-domestic studies, and 11,878 and 11,883 (0.79% and 0.81%) were Korea-international collaborative studies, thus a total of 43,751 and 42,525 (2.93% and 2.91%) papers were from Korea affiliations (Table 1).In 2024, among 1,505,450 published papers, 30,473 (1.97%) were Korea-domestic studies, and 12,778 (0.83%) were Korea-international collaborative studies.While the total contribution of Koreaaffiliated publications decreased from 2.91% in 2023 to 2.79% in 2024, Korea-international collaborative studies were unaffected (0.81% to 0.83%).Furthermore, the monthly proportion of papers from Korea affiliations decreased after March 2024 (Table 1, Fig. 1).Comparing months from March through December for each year,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".