Critical Appraisal of Anesthesiology Educational Research for 2021

Background: Based on a review of anesthesiology education articles published in 2021, the authors conducted a critical appraisal to describe trends in the literature, highlight innovations in the field, and identify high-yield articles for clinician educators in anesthesiology. Methods: After a database search (3 Ovid MEDLINE databases, Embase.com, ERIC [via FirstSearch], PsycINFO [via EBSCOhost], and PubMed), abstracts were screened by 2 independent reviewers based on inclusion criteria. Articles representing publications in both anesthesiology-specific journals and general medical education journals were included via manual search. Three randomly assigned raters reviewed and scored each quantitative article using a rubric. Two raters scored qualitative studies using a separate rubric designed for qualitative studies. Each article also received an overall quality rating used to create an additional list of recommended articles. Results: The database search identified 1141 articles and an additional manual search identified 1497 articles. Of these, 67 articles met the inclusion criteria (61 quantitative, 6 qualitative). This article reports and summarizes the top 13 quantitative articles and top 2 qualitative papers. Conclusions: This year we did not see as many articles describing curriculum to teach learners procedures, a topic heavily present in previous years. Also, analysis revealed an increase in articles focused on nontechnical skill education and a trend toward how to assess learner performance. Finally, 2 articles focused on gender issues in anesthesiology, an emerging area of interest.