Academic Department, Divisions, Sections

Unit Descriptions

Medical school websites provide a directory of their Academic Departments—one of several types of “academic units.” We list every observed academic department-division-section-center-unit in a school directory that refers to their educational pursuits in the basic sciences, clinical sciences, and other sciences (i.e., health, public heath, medical humanities, sociomedical sciences, etc.)—regardless of whether or not a hyperlink is associated for each unit.

When academic units are presented, we provide the nomenclature used by the school to describe that unit. Innumerable instances occur whereby a school references a unit as a division in a directory listing or in the URL itself, but on the unit’s landing page that descriptor is absent or else the unit is referred to as a section, specialty, subspecialty, focus, or clinical service, etc.—in which instance we make a judgement call re: nomenclature.

To enhance clarity for the user and to ‘level the playing field’ for all schools, if a preponderance of schools associate the word division, for example, with a particular set of departmental sub-units, we establish a figurative line of demarcation by also using the word division between department names and their sub-units, even if a particular school does not use that term in its presentation.

Unit Hyperlinks

Absence of a hyperlink in a school directory possibly means: (a) the unit reference is valid but, for whatever reason, the school has not attached a URL; or (b) the unit reference is invalid (i.e., the unit might no longer exist), and the school has failed to remove the reference from the directory.

Also, even valid hyperlinks might not load in an acceptable amount of time; a page might resolve to a destination that is obviously incorrect/irrelevant for the referenced unit; or, a page resolves to a URL that returns an error code/message. As a courtesy to medical schools and users alike, when we encounter such situations we attempt to identify a valid URL for the referenced unit—before annotating that record with a parenthetical notation. If discovered, we apply the correct URL and notify schools that we applied a correction in our directory.

Unit ‘Homes’

Departments hyperlink their units either to an academic home (administration, education and training; i.e., where the URL typically includes an “.edu” suffix and resolves to the medical school itself); or, to a clinical home (patient care; i.e., where the URL typically includes a “.org” or “health” suffix and resolves to the medical school’s clinical affiliate (hospital/medical center/clinic, etc.)

Generally, for disciplines in which a school hosts an academic component (vs. only providing clinical services in that discipline), unit hyperlinks usually resolve to their academic home. However, there is no scripted approach regarding how schools reference their respective units; some schools hyperlink their department names to an academic home, while others hyperlink to their clinical home. In some instances, a department URL might resolve to an academic home, but hyperlinks to sub-units might resolve to the clinical home of the department.

When a department references one of its divisions or sections, it is often indeterminable whether the reference is being made to a formally organized, administrative/operational entity, or whether the reference is used merely to connote a separate area of focus, clinical service, specialization; frequently, segmentation is also assigned by referencing medical conditions, diseases, disorders or treatments.