Evaluating award-winning doctoral theses to reveal PhD research landscape: A case study of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade

Background : Doctoral programmes are an important pillar of medical education, and although many universities award the best theses, the criteria for selection of awardees and the topics of their doctoral theses are seldom analysed. Objectives : To analyse the landscape of doctoral research through assessing the temporal trends in the criteria related to recognising the best theses. Methods : A total of 55 award-winning doctoral theses, from those submitted to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, over 7 years (2016–2022), were examined, focusing on the number of awardees, publications based on the theses, research subfields, and keywords. Results : The awardees comprised 36 women (65%) and 19 men (35%). The number of award-winning theses per year in clinical medicine and public health increased over the years ( P < .05 for both the fields). The awardees had published a total of 134 articles based on their theses before the thesis defence, and half of these were published in open-access journals. The journals that each published at least 4 of these articles were PLOS One , Experimental and Molecular Pathology , and Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity . The cumulative impact factor of these publications showed no significant increase ( P > .05). The subfields that accounted for at least 5 of the publi-cations were molecular medicine (13 publications) among the basic or translational fields, cardiology (5) among clinical medicine, and epidemiology (7) among public health. Mapping the co-occurrence of keywords from all the dissertations identified some research hotspots, which included cancer, oxidative stress, Parkinsonism, risk factors, genetic polymorphisms, and biomarkers. Conclusion : The increasing number of award-winning theses reflects the rising quality of doctoral research and the growing motivation of candidates to choose indexed journals as outlets for papers based on the theses. This approach can serve as a basis for strategic evaluation of the practices for evaluating PhD theses and for identifying strong and weak spots in the research landscape of medical schools to guide future doctoral research and the competitiveness of doctoral programmes.