Toward a Model of Institutional Scholarship in Health Professions Education

Using an expanded definition of scholarship that goes beyond the scholarship of discovery (research) to include the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching, this article explains interrelationships among these scholarship types in health professions and specifically dental education. Such interrelationships can lead to meaningful expansion of scholarship especially in the form of translational research, which relies on the development of all four of these types of scholarship. In recent years, health care-related organizations have been seeking ways to expand translational research. At the same time, an increasing number of academic institutions have been considering how to redefine what qualifies as advancing one's discipline in ways that go beyond mere number of publications and grants to better reflect the faculty member's overall scholarly effort. These redefinitions and a new attention to scholarly collaboration have led to the concept of a "complete scholar": one who makes contributions in all four areas of scholarship by collaborating with other scholars, practitioners, and members of the community. Expanding the concept of a complete scholar to that of a "complete institution" is the basis for what we propose as a Model of Institutional Scholarship. This model is exemplified by the Cochrane Collaboration, a gold standard for a complete vision of research on evidence-based health care. In the Model of Institutional Scholarship, an institution can visualize, plan, develop, and orchestrate all scholarship being conducted within its realm, creating collaborations among individual efforts that will enhance effectiveness and the creation of new knowledge.