How is the salary of professors and researchers in medicine?

Question

For university-level researchers and professors, is the salary higher in the medical fields than in other fields? I suppose attracting physicians to teach may be harder, because they can usually get high payments working as physicians. Where can I find data about this in Europe, Australia, Canada and US?

Answer 1

For the US, I would have thought the data would be in the AAUP report, but I cannot find any data that breaks salaries down by field.

There is also CUPA-HR. The free data set has a break down by field with "HEALTH PROFESSIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS" as a field. I would assume that this includes medical doctors, but also nurses. There is also some free data about non-tenure track salaries including "Medicine, Medical Clinical Sciences, Graduate Medical Studies".

In summary, I think defining the "medicine area" and equating job duties and responsibilities is tough. There appears to be a large variation in salaries.

Answer 2

So the problem with this question is going to be one of comparing like with like. I have seen some grants that implicitly assume an MDs salary is higher than a PhD's salary when in the same R01-type grant application, but this usually also involves a comparison of senior vs. junior faculty, which is always tricky. Even comparing "tenured faculty" is hard, because tenure at many medical schools is a much, much more rare thing to have.

I'd say the following generalizations are probably defensible, assuming we are talking about academic medicine vs. "nearby" fields, or PhDs in academic medicine.

• Hard money positions in research hospitals for doing research are vanishingly rare.
• MDs do have the option of making up for some "gaps" in funding with taking on more clinical duties whereas a PhD might have to take a salary hit, or cut back in other areas.
• Opportunities for clinical consulting, to pharma, device manufacturers, etc. are probably more available to clinicians.

Answer 3

You could mine some of the Collegiate Times public university salaries data, e.g.,

UVA Medicine salaries

vs.

UVA English salaries

vs.

UVA Chemistry salaries

Obviously, you have to make apples-to-apples comparisons (full professor -vs- full professor, asst. professor -vs- assistant professor, etc.), and also realize that the State provides as little information as they have to by law, and there may be other hidden data that sway the results one way or another (for instance, you'll see full professors making $45000, but these might be half-year appointments, sabbatical years, etc.).