Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Introduction: In Mexico, most medical students are interested in accessing a specialty training course. The general practitioner must present and pass the National Exam for Medical Residencies (ENARM), which is used annually and whose main objective is to select the best scores that allow doctors to perform a medical specialty in the hospitals available within the Mexican territory. Many circumstances can influence the possibility of being selected for a medical course specialty, such as academic performance, student learning strategies, socio-economic, psychological, and educational aspects, among others. Objective: This study aimed to identify and compare academic performance indicators associated with the accreditation of the national exam for the medical residency course between two curricular models. Method: This is a comparative cross-sectional study of students of two curricular models in medicine. Variables of academic performance in undergraduate studies and the scores obtained in the national exam for the medical residency course were analyzed. Results: 329 students included. In general, academic performance up to 5th grade (point grade average ≥ 87.61) was associated with a significantly higher frequency of accredited students (88.8%); the competency-based model had a higher percentage (77.4%) of those accredited in the national exam. The average grades of the bachelor’s degree and ENARM were higher for the traditional curricular model. A significant correlation was observed between the general grade point average and the national medical residency exam (r=585, p=0.000). Conclusions: These results suggest that academic performance, such as the bachelor grades and the averages of the disciplinary areas, from the first to the fifth year of the degree, are related to the probability of accrediting and obtaining high scores in the national medical residency exam. The competency based curricular model favors the accreditation of the National Medical Residency Examination.

Introduction: Readers express their comments in the form of letters to the editor about previously published articles, original research that does not reach the original article, or general topics that require attention because of their novelty. It has the possibility of receiving a response in the form of a reply. Objective: Describe the characteristics of the letters to the editor published during the period 2015-2020 in the journals of medical education in Spanish indexed in SciELO or Scopus. Method: A descriptive, retrospective, and bibliometric study of the letters to the editor of the journals: Educación Médica, Educación Médica Superior, Investigación en Educación Médica y la Revista de la Fundación Educación Médica. The period covered was from January 2015 to December 2020. Results: The annual average of letters to the editor was 13.23%, with a minimum value of 6.58% in 2015 and a maximum of 18.41% in 2018. The institutional affiliation of universities was the most frequent (84.71%). The majority of authors had Peruvian affiliation (43.80%) and the male sex (78.93%). The letters written in Spanish were 99.59%. In relation to the general purpose, the general comments (42.56%) and comments on previously published articles (40.50%) predominated. The average number of citations was 4.24, with own findings having the highest average at 6.39. Only 11 letters had replies. The average number of authors was 2.02. Conclusions: The publication of letters to the editor had an increase over the years, its use as a means of criticism is still frequent; however, feedback and exchange of ideas through replication was not frequent.

Introduction: A sense of belonging is the representation of ourselves, a feeling of identification and bonding due to being included with a group and the environment where it develops, with the construction of our meanings. Objective: To identify whether the proposed instrument is valid to determine the sense of belonging in residents. Method: In this analytical cross-sectional study for the adaptation of the questionnaire on the sense of belonging to the medical area, five experts collaborated for content validity using the Delphi method; 101 residents in the pilot test for construct validity through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability with Cronbach’s alfa coefficient. The research was registered with the Research Ethics Committee No. 10088 and the Local Health Research Committee No. 1008 of the IMSS. All participants signed the informed consent. Results: Two rounds of the expert review were conducted to consider the questionnaire valid; the overall Cronbach’s alfa coefficient was 0.97 and >0.90 for each of its sections. Employing the AFE, a four-factor structure was identified, with a KMO adequacy measure of 0.885, Bartlett’s test of sphericity <0.05, and a correlation between variables >0.6. The questionnaire consisted of nineteen items, grouped into four factors: affective, psychological-social, academic, and physical. The total variance explained manifests with the first four factors with 65.31%. Conclusions: The adaptation of the PUCMM-CSTA sense of belonging questionnaire to the medical area shows good psychometrics, so it is valid and dependable to evaluate the sense of belonging in students of medical specialization courses.

Despite the new reflections and ideological currents in medical sciences, many researchers remain firmly attached to scientific positivism, naive inductivism and totally reductionist views, where the use of inferential statistics is considered almost indispensable to consider a “high quality” research, and within it, consider the famous p-value as the number that determines that a study is “good” or “bad”, that it is worthwhile or not, that it came out “good” or “bad”. Although inferential statistics is the most frequent in medical sciences, many researchers continue with epistemological problems for the p-value interpretation and make statistical decisions; Therefore, the main objective of this work is to provide a reflection and dynamic analysis of what is p-value, how it is obtained, how it is usually interpreted, and how it should be interpreted. It should be noted that this paper does not intend to teach statistics, but rather tries to change the way in which students and health professionals interpret inferential statistics, in order to encourage critical reading and thus provide weapons for self-taught learning. To arrive at the appropriate analysis of the p-value, throughout the work I carry out a general and graphic review about the construction of hypotheses, the normal distribution and the hypothesis tests. Although the simple fact that this work talks about inferential statistics already makes it (until a certain point) a positivist article, I hope that the new teaching in this area will allow the training of new professionals and researchers with broader visions of research, and thus, ending the promotion of reductionism and naive inductivism.

Introduction: Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the teaching methodologies used in the training of health professionals; the importance of the structure and content of the clinical cases to which the students are exposed to achieve the educational objectives has been previously described; however, the evidence on its quality in the teaching of physiotherapists is scarce. Objective: To evaluate the quality of four clinical cases used in the teaching of physiotherapy based on the opinion of students and teachers. Method: A cross-sectional analytical study that evaluated, through a validated questionnaire, the quality of the content and structure of four cases used by students of the physiotherapy degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Results: The instrument did not perform equally well for physiotherapy students, with students identifying one factor for all four cases, while teachers identified two factors related to learning skills and prior knowledge. The overall score of compliance with the characteristics was higher than four for both students and teachers (as they considered them to be of good quality). Conclusions: The opinion of teachers and students provides valuable information on the usefulness of the clinical cases used; however, it demands an objective evaluation of the performance of the students in real clinical practice.