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Healthcare Crisis in Korea and Its Impact on Medical Research: A PubMed Analysis (2022–2024)

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: In 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.1,2 The 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.3,4 However, 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,

Source: Journal of Korean Medical Science

DOI: 10.3346/jkms.2025.40.e112

Authors: Soo Ick Cho, Jeong-Moo Lee, Hyung Jun Park, Jungyo Suh, Ro Woon Lee