This commentary evaluates the challenges in estimating prevalence rates of the impostor phenomenon among health service providers, suggesting conceptual and methodological improvements.
The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) describes self-perceptions of intellectual fraudulence despite external and/or objective feedback supporting one's intellectual abilities [1]. Salari and colleagues [2] provided a meta-analysis of the IP among health service providers, aggregating data from 30 studies and 11,483 participants. One of their major aims was reporting the prevalence (i.e., the proportion of a population affected by a condition) of the IP. Therefore, they analyzed studies reporting prevalence rates. While we applaud the aspiration of Salari and colleagues in their work, we discuss why it is currently not suitable to interpret prevalence rates of the IP from a conceptual and methodological perspective.
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Brauer et al. (2026) studied this question.
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