Documentary research and evaluation in medical education

Medical education research has blossomed over the past 30 years. There are a growing number of general medical education journals and even some that cater for sub disciplines within medical education. 1 The content of these journals ranges from original research to systematic reviews to perspectives and opinion pieces. The original research itself takes a variety of forms from quantitative to qualitative-both of which categories contain a variety of methodologies. However there is one form of research that rarely features in the medical education literature and that is documentary research. Documentary research is research involving the analysis of documents (typically historical documents). It is undertaken for a number of reasons but primarily to gain insight into activities of the past and into the processes of change that have led from the past to the present. Hegel said that “we learn from history that we do not learn from history,” but here I would beg to differ. In medical education, we can learn from the past and just one example of this is the recent paper by Gill and Griffin 2 in Medical Education. In this paper, the authors analysed the text of Good Medical Practice produced by the General Medical Council between 1963 and 2010. Their analysis showed that there had been a “shift from a doctor-centred regulatory discourse to a patient-centred health improvement agenda over the period of time examined.” The core purpose of documentary research is ultimately educational evaluation. The reason why we conduct documentary research on policy papers, journal articles or even written curricula is to evaluate them and share the lessons learned from evaluation on to others.