bims-evares Biomed News
on Evaluation of research
Issue of 2019‒06‒30
sixteen papers selected by
Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society


  1. Neurosurgery. 2019 Jun 24. pii: nyz207. [Epub ahead of print]
      Many indices have been developed to assess the impact of scientific publications by investigators, disciplines, and institutions. The h-index has emerged as a leading tool in the assessment of the productivity of authors. Differences in publication and citation opportunity among specialties create inappropriate conclusions when the h-index is used to compare authors across different disciplines. An alternative, the Radicchi index, hf, has been proposed to assess the impact of publications across disciplines. We curated a database of all articles published from 2002 to 2015 from the 3 highest impact factor medical journals: New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the Lancet, and the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). With this database, articles were categorized into medical subspecialties. We calculated the respective h-index and Radicchi index of each specialty. We found that the Radicchi index eliminated variability associated with publication and citation opportunity between different specialties when compared to the h-index. The Radicchi index is a useful measure of scientific impact and productivity that advances the h-index by allowing interspecialty comparisons. There remains a need to define a researcher's specialty designation especially if he/she conducts multidisciplinary research.
    Keywords:  Academics; Bibliometrics; Citations; H-index; Productivity
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/neuros/nyz207
  2. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jun 24. pii: 201812341. [Epub ahead of print]
      Scientists and inventors increasingly work in teams, raising fundamental questions about the nature of team production and making individual assessment increasingly difficult. Here we present a method for describing individual and team citation impact that both is computationally feasible and can be applied in standard, wide-scale databases. We track individuals across collaboration networks to define an individual citation index and examine outcomes when each individual works alone or in teams. Studying 24 million research articles and 3.9 million US patents, we find a substantial impact advantage of teamwork over solo work. However, this advantage declines as differences between the team members' individual citation indices grow. Team impact is predicted more by the lower-citation rather than the higher-citation team members, typically centering near the harmonic average of the individual citation indices. Consistent with this finding, teams tend to assemble among individuals with similar citation impact in all fields of science and patenting. In assessing individuals, our index, which accounts for each coauthor, is shown to have substantial advantages over existing measures. First, it more accurately predicts out-of-sample paper and patent outcomes. Second, it more accurately characterizes which scholars are elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Overall, the methodology uncovers universal regularities that inform team organization while also providing a tool for individual evaluation in the team production era.
    Keywords:  collaboration; prediction; team organization; team science
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812341116
  3. Requir Eng. 2019 ;24(2): 133-160
      Over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to the area of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), where goals are used as a useful conceptualization to elicit, model, and analyze requirements, capturing alternatives and conflicts. Goal modeling has been adapted and applied to many sub-topics within requirements engineering (RE) and beyond, such as agent orientation, aspect orientation, business intelligence, model-driven development, and security. Despite extensive efforts in this field, the RE community lacks a recent, general systematic literature review of the area. In this work, we present a systematic mapping study, covering the 246 top-cited GORE-related conference and journal papers, according to Scopus. Our literature map addresses several research questions: we classify the types of papers (e.g., proposals, formalizations, meta-studies), look at the presence of evaluation, the topics covered (e.g., security, agents, scenarios), frameworks used, venues, citations, author networks, and overall publication numbers. For most questions, we evaluate trends over time. Our findings show a proliferation of papers with new ideas and few citations, with a small number of authors and papers dominating citations; however, there is a slight rise in papers which build upon past work (implementations, integrations, and extensions). We see a rise in papers concerning adaptation/variability/evolution and a slight rise in case studies. Overall, interest in GORE has increased. We use our analysis results to make recommendations concerning future GORE research and make our data publicly available.
    Keywords:  GORE; Goal model; Goal-oriented requirements engineering; Systematic mapping study
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0280-z
  4. PLoS One. 2019 ;14(6): e0218793
      Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics which reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counterintuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218793
  5. Psychol Rep. 2019 Jun 26. 33294119860257
      
    Keywords:  American Psychological Association; Psychology; Women; collaboration patterns; gender; scientific production
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294119860257
  6. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2019 Jun 24. pii: fnz139. [Epub ahead of print]
      The journal FEMS Microbiology Letters covers all aspects of microbiology including virology. On which scientific shoulders do the papers published in this journal stand? Which are the classic papers used by the authors? We aim to answer these questions in this study by applying the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis to all papers published in this journal between 1977 and 2017. In total, 16,837 publications with 410,586 cited references are analyzed. Mainly, the studies published in the journal FEMS Microbiology Letters mainly draw knowledge from methods developed to quantify or characterize biochemical substances such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or carbohydrates and from improvements of techniques suitable for studies of bacterial genetics. The techniques frequently used for studying the genetic of microorganisms in FEMS Microbiology Letters' studies were developed using samples prepared from microorganisms. Methods required for the investigation of proteins, carbohydrates, or lipids were mostly transferred from other fields of life science to microbiology.
    Keywords:  bibliometrics; cited references; microbiology; reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS)
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnz139
  7. J Am Acad Orthop Surg. 2019 Jul 01. 27(13): 493-501
      INTRODUCTION: Participation of women in medicine has increased markedly in recent decades, but gender disparities still exist, particularly in academic medicine. To provide insight into the gender gap, specifically in academic orthopaedic sports medicine, we investigated the relationship between gender and authorship in orthopaedic sports literature from 1972 to 2018.METHODS: Information about every original article in four prominent orthopaedic sports medicine journals between 1972 and 2018 was extracted from PubMed. The proportions of female first, second, middle, and senior authors over time were determined. Gender influences on level of evidence, academic degrees, and academic productivity and longevity were also studied. Student t-test, multiple linear regression, chi-square test, Cochran-Armitage trend test, and Kaplan-Meier analysis were used to determine significance between groups.
    RESULTS: In our sample, 16.6% of all authors were female. The proportion of female authors increased from 2.6% (1972 to 1979) to 14.7% (2010 to 2018). Female authors averaged fewer publications (1.9 versus 2.8 articles for male authors) and were more likely to be attributed middle authorship (45.9% versus 37.1%) than senior authorship (14.7% versus 22.1%, P < 0.001). Female authors were more likely to be full-time research staff, such as a PhD (18.2% versus 9.0%, P < 0.001), which correlated with a higher level of evidence (B = -0.162, P < 0.001). Gender differences in academic longevity decreased over decades (1972 to 1989, 1990 to 1999, 2000 to 2008), demonstrated by decreasing significance of Kaplan-Meier log-rank tests (<0.01, <0.01, 0.045).
    CONCLUSION: Female investigators in orthopaedic sports medicine are authoring publications at a growing rate, increasing almost sevenfold from 1972 to 2018. Although women published two-thirds the volume of male investigators overall, and were more likely to be full-time research staff, gender differences in academic productivity and longevity have decreased over time.
    LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III, Retrospective Cohort Design, Observational Study.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5435/JAAOS-D-18-00669
  8. Int Orthop. 2019 Jun 26.
      PURPOSE: We aimed to apply bibliometric tools to Australian and New Zealand orthopaedic publications produced between 2008 and 2018 to identify the most highly cited publications, author and institution collaboration networks and topic trends. Analysis of the literature can highlight areas of emerging interest and knowledge gaps, and direct future research.METHODS: A systematic search was conducted using Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. Citation analysis was carried out using Web of Science. Collaboration networks were constructed using chord diagrams. Trends in publication topics were analysed using simple linear regression to find the rate of change of publication volume on each topic.
    RESULTS: A total of 3097 publications contributed to by 8855 individual authors met inclusion criteria. Across the study period, there was a large increase in the annual volume of publications on the topic of ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) surgery. We also found that collaboration between Australian and New Zealand authors was very low with only 1% (n = 31) of publications including authors from both countries and 0.4% (n = 12) including orthopaedic surgeons or trainees from both.
    CONCLUSIONS: Publications on ACL surgery have increased over the past decade, likely due to the presence of competing surgical approaches and the recently recognized risk of osteoarthritis following ACL reconstruction. The overall collaboration between Australian and New Zealand authors was very low which lends itself to opportunities for future research.
    Keywords:  Anterior cruciate ligament; Australia; Bibliometrics; New Zealand; Orthopaedics
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-019-04359-1
  9. Clin Implant Dent Relat Res. 2019 Jun 25.
      BACKGROUND: Implant dentistry is subject to major economic pressures as a result of the growth in the manufacturing and commercialization of dental implants.PURPOSE: To examine research funding in implant dentistry by means of a bibliometric analysis of articles indexed in Web of Science (WoS) published during the period 2008-2017.
    MATERIALS AND METHODS: The search was conducted applying the truncated term "implant*" in the WoS dentistry area. Only items labeled as "article" or "review" were selected. Records were manually refined and normalized to unify terms and to remove typographical, transcription, and/or indexing errors.
    RESULTS: A total of 14 255 records were identified for analysis. About 5002 of the 14 255 published works received funding. Of these, 85.9% of funded research articles received at least one citation. Of the 7733 funding entities mentioned, 29.8% were government entities, 25% NGOs and Foundations, 23.7% private companies, 19.6% academic entities, and 1.9% hospitals and research centers. Clinical Oral Implants Research and the International Journal of Oral & Maxillofacial Implants published the highest numbers of funded articles.
    CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed an overall increase in the funding of research in implant dentistry in recent years. Funded articles were cited more frequently and published in journals with higher impact factors.
    Keywords:  bibliometric analysis; dental implants; dentistry; funding; study type
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/cid.12810
  10. PeerJ. 2019 ;7 e7116
      Background: Sepsis represents a significant healthcare problem worldwide and causes a high number of deaths every year but remains to be fully understood. During and after sepsis, the host immune response is complex and involves an initial excessive host inflammatory response to infection that is closely related to tissue damage and leads to organ failure. Over the past three decades, immunotherapy for sepsis has vastly improved, but in this area, the most influential articles, journals, authors, and countries have not yet been completely summarized and analyzed.Objective: Performed a bibliometric analysis on all the articles concerning immunotherapy for sepsis from 1962 to 2019 was our objective, and we also explored the potential correlations between publications of different countries and their gross domestic product (GDP).
    Methods: All articles about immunotherapy for sepsis were extracted from the Scopus database and analyzed. We also retrieved GDP data from all the countries that have published information from the World Bank.
    Results: In summary, we have retrieved 1,483 related articles from the Scopus database starting from the first publication on immunotherapy for sepsis in 1962 through March 16, 2019. Over the past decade, the number of the articles published has increased year by year to reach 866 in total, which accounts for about 58% of all publications, with 2017 being the most prolific year when 179 articles were published. The US published 604 articles (41%), followed by China (n = 163, 11%), and Germany (n = 158, 11%). In terms of publishing media, the journal that published the highest number of the articles was Journal of Critical Care Medicine with 65 articles (4%), followed by Shock with 55 articles (4%), and Critical Care with 35 articles (2%). There was a strong correlation between the GDP of the different countries and their publication numbers (r = 0.811, P < 0.001).
    Conclusions: Our present study analyzed all types of articles concerning immunotherapy for sepsis over the past 57 years and countries with high GDP tends to make more contributions to the medical field of this field. In the meantime, these studies highlight the importance of immunotherapy in the treatment of sepsis patients. The recognition of the historical status and development trend of this field can promote inter-agency cooperation, guide future research, and ultimately provide the basis for clinical practice guidelines.
    Keywords:  Bibliometric analysis; Immunotherapy; Sepsis
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7116
  11. MEDICC Rev. 2019 Jan;21(1): 17-25
      INTRODUCTION The steadily increasing prevalence of diabetes globally has captured researchers' attention. Cuban production of scientific articles on diabetes has not been studied from a bibliometric perspective. OBJECTIVE Characterize the production and impact of research and review articles on diabetes by Cuban authors in journals listed in the Scopus bibliographic database, as well as related collaboration among Cuban institutions and between Cuban and non-Cuban institutions. METHODS A bibliometric analysis was conducted using 2000-2017 data from the Scopus database. The following search strategy was used: descriptor (diabetes), country (Cuba), publication source (journal), article type (original research, review article). Bibliographic indicators of production, visibility, impact and collaboration were examined. RESULTS Cuba contributed 3.2% of Latin American production and 0.1% of global production related to diabetes. Within Cuba's scientific production (610 articles, 538 original research and 72 review), 85.9% had a Cuban corresponding author (Cuban leadership). In articles with international collaboration (22.9%), however, most (67.9%) had non-Cuban corresponding authors. A total of 47% (287) were articles involving a single institution. Only 11.1% were published in top-ranked journals, and 14.4% were cited >10 times. Cubans were lead authors on 0.3% of the most frequently cited (top 10%) articles on diabetes in Scopus. A total of 38.4% of this production appeared in low-impact journals and 57.9% in Cuban journals. Articles published in English accounted for 30% of total and obtained higher impact in terms of citations than articles in Spanish. The strongest networks for scientific collaboration were those that connected Cuban and US researchers. CONCLUSIONS Cuban scientists conduct research on diabetes, but their work is not highly visible in the peer-reviewed literature, particularly in top-ranked journals. The problem is not simply one of publishing more, but of knowing how and where to publish. It is urgent that Cuban universities training health professionals at all levels include instruction on scientific writing.
  12. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2019 Jun 25. pii: fnz138. [Epub ahead of print]
      Great progress in microbiota research during last decades resulted in a growing corpus of publications mentioning the term 'microbiota'. Specifically, the human microbiota increasingly recognised nowadays as one of the most important health challenges is becoming an emerging research front. By examining over 28 000 microbiota-related papers from Web of Science database, our study aims to characterise the evolution of publication patterns in this field between 1999 and 2017. The corpus is first analysed in terms of breakdown by journal subject categories, then an additional insight in the structuring of the microbiota research into different topics is provided by means of topic modelling. Our results demonstrate that over time (1) a substantial increase in the publications number is accompanied by a broad diversification of associated journal subject categories; (2) the research focus moved outside from its primary research field showing successive shifts from dentistry and ecologically-centred areas, through agri-food applied topics, towards the most recent clinical applications. The trends in thematic structure of the field presented from a historical perspective suggest that current systemic approach to host-microbiota relationship inherited from the ecological background of the concept of microbiota has opened up a number of new research directions and perspectives.
    Keywords:  Growth rate; Microbiota; Research trends; Scientific publications; Scientometrics; Topic modelling
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnz138
  13. Occup Ther Health Care. 2019 Jun 27. 1-26
      A bibliometric analysis of high impact and highly cited peer-reviewed literature published between 1992 and 2016 by Canadian occupational therapy authors that were included in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) was completed. To complete the analysis, journal article titles, abstracts, author details, and keywords were searched. A second-filter identified articles where the first or corresponding author had a Canadian affiliation and occupational therapy qualification. The total number of times an article was cited since its initial publication and during 2016 in Web of Science Core Collection was recorded. A total of 919 retrieved articles met the inclusion criteria with 18 articles having 5 or more citations during 2016 alone and another 34 articles having 50 or more citations since their initial publication date. The top three journals where high impact and highly-cited articles were published were Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Disability and Rehabilitation, and American Journal of Occupational Therapy. The three institutions that generated the largest number of high impact and highly cited articles were McGill University, University of Toronto, and University of British Columbia. Therefore, as of 2016, Canadian occupational therapy authors published 18 high impact and 34 highly cited articles.
    Keywords:  Authors; bibliometrics; impact factor; journal manuscripts; peer-review; publication metrics
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/07380577.2019.1633587
  14. Med Clin (Barc). 2019 Jun 22. pii: S0025-7753(19)30345-8. [Epub ahead of print]
      BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: To analyse articles retracted due to irregularities by authors helps to determine the state of scientific integrity of a discipline or country. The Retraction Watch (RW) database is the largest worldwide database on retracted articles. The objective was to determine the reasons for and features of retracted biomedical articles by Spanish authors.MATERIAL AND METHODS: A search was conducted in the RW database of 7 types of scientific articles from 9 biomedicine disciplines -biology, genetics, medicine, microbiology, neurosciences, nutrition, dentistry, public health and toxicology-, with at least one author working in a Spanish centre, and published between 1970 and 2018. The features of the articles and the reasons for their retraction were recorded.
    RESULTS: Of the 18,621 retracted articles, 217 (1%) were by Spanish authors; 155 (74%) were on biomedicine and the types of articles of interest. In most cases, there were several reasons for retracting an article. Research misconduct (fabrication, falsification, plagiarism) and duplication were involved in 23% and 35% of the cases, respectively. Only 8% of the articles were retracted due to errors by the authors or the journals. A dentist retracted 18 articles -all from the same journal and in the same year, 2018-, which accounts for 12% of all retracted biomedicine articles.
    CONCLUSION: The number of retracted biomedicine articles by Spanish authors is low. Research misconduct was a frequent reason, with few articles retracted due to honest errors.
    Keywords:  Artículos retractados; Base de datos Retraction Watch; Biology; Biología; Biomedicina; Biomedicine; España; Genetics; Genética; Medicina; Medicine; Microbiology; Microbiología; Neurociencias; Neurosciences; Nutrición; Nutrition; Odontology; Odontología; Public health; Retracted articles; Retraction Watch database; Salud pública; Spain; Toxicology; Toxicología
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medcli.2019.04.018
  15. Int J Impot Res. 2019 Jun 24.
      Insufficient penile erection to facilitate vaginal penetration is a medical condition referred to as erectile dysfunction (ED). By the year 2025, the number of ED cases across the world is expected to reach 322 million. There are numerous publications and studies in the field of ED over the past decades. Our aim is to comprehensively analyze the global scientific outputs of ED research and show the trends and hotspots in ED research. Data of publications were downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection. We used CiteSpace IV and Excel 2016 to analyze literature information, including journals, countries/regions, institutes, authors, citation reports, and research frontiers. Until October 26, 2018, a total of 8880 papers in ED research were identified as published between 2008 and 2018. Journal of Sexual Medicine published the most articles. The United States contributed the most publications and occupied leading positions in H-index value and the number of ESI top papers. Maggi M owned the highest co-citations. The keyword "Oxidative stress" ranked first in the research front-line. The amount of articles published in ED research has been stable from 2008 to 2018. The United States showed enormous progress in ED research, and is still the dominant country. Oxidative stress, vardenafil, and late-onset hypogonadism were the latest research frontiers and should be paid more attention.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-019-0161-8
  16. Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2019 Jun 25.
      The original publication of this paper contain typographical mistakes. 'Michael Bell' mentioned in this paper should be corrected as 'Michelle L. Bell'.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05792-w