Maintaining pharmacy education's research focus as the academy expands.

In 2006, dean William H. Campbell made the following observations: For academic programs to provide quality professional instruction, full-time faculty must be actively engaged in research in the pharmaceutical sciences...Faculty who cannot participate in expanding the body of knowledge required by practice and science cannot be expected to provide mastery level instruction to pharmacy students. Demonstration of active engagement in the pharmaceutical sciences must include extramural support, scholarly publication, scientific presentations, and supervision of graduate (masters, PhD, postdoctoral) students... (1) The authors agree with this assessment. Indeed, in crafting Standards 2007, (2) the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), through stakeholder feedback, listed "scholarship and research" as one of 12 areas that were emphasized in the revision process. There are different forms of scholarship, (3) with research (or the scholarship of discovery) being just one. In Standards 2007, the relevant section is Standard 25 (Faculty and Staff), guideline 8, which reads: Faculty should generate and disseminate knowledge through scholarship. Scholarship by faculty members, including the scholarship of teaching, must be evident and demonstrated by productive research and other scholarly activities, such as contributions to the scientific, professional, and educational literature; publication of books and review articles; and successes in securing extramural funding to support research and other scholarly activities. Although the standard may seem straightforward, it could be interpreted in different ways: from non-research forms of scholarship (eg, review papers); to alternate forms of scholarship not necessarily associated with publication, such as the scholarship of application (ie, clinical practice) or the scholarship of engagement (ie, public service); to the traditional currency of research in colleges and schools of pharmacy, with benchmarks such as competitive federal funding and subsequent peer-reviewed publications of original work in visible, high-impact journals. The authors do not wish to minimize the importance of scholarship, broadly defined (3); all forms of scholarly contribution within colleges and schools of pharmacy are clearly important. Nevertheless, what we are most concerned with, and is the subject of this statement, is the latter form of scholarship, defined by Boyer (3) as the scholarship of discovery. The report of the 2003-2004 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Research and Graduate Affairs Committee (4) noted an increasing concern about the "potential diminution of the academy's collective scholarship, particularly in the area of the scholarship of discovery, because of the increasing numbers of new pharmacy programs at institutions with an unknown culture of scholarship." Eight years after that report, it is now possible to objectively describe the cohort of newer colleges with regard to their emphasis on research and to preliminarily discern if this committee's concerns were well founded. For the purposes of this paper, we compared the new colleges and schools of pharmacy (those that admitted students during or after the year 2000) and the older colleges from the AACP Web site (5) list of members with respect to their research focus. There are 45 colleges and schools of pharmacy that first admitted students during or after the year 2000 and 79 colleges in the pre-2000 group. Of the newer colleges and schools, 10 of the 45 have "research" as a stated part of their mission (though many more mention "scholarship"). Most are not associated with academic health centers, (6) which are great sources of interdisciplinary education and also provide access to patients for research, non-pharmacy collaborators, and a culture of translational research and discovery. …