| Summary: | Background While medical education researchers have acknowledged the difficulty of developing a definition of rural, authors have also suggested that definitions of rural should be suited to their research purpose (du Plessis et al. 2001, Couper 2003). Objectives One component of the Learners and Locations project undertaken at the Health Research Unit at MUN focused on developing a definition of rural for medical education research. In this paper, we describe the L & L community classification system and compare it to the Statistical Area Classification (SAC) categories developed by Statistics Canada. Methods Statistics Canada and Canadian National Road Network data, along with the GIS software ArcGIS, was used to divide Newfoundland and Labrador communities into the 11 categories developed in the L & L project: Metropolis (Pop. > 1,000,000); Very Large City (Pop. 500,000–1,000,000); Large City (Pop. 100,000–500,000); Medium City (Pop. 50,000–100,000); Small City (Pop. 10,000–50,000, 500km); Rural Close Community (Pop.
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