bims-evares Biomed News
on Evaluation of research
Issue of 2019‒10‒20
seventeen papers selected by
Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society
  1. Bibliometric mapping for current and potential collaboration detection.
  2. Shorter distances between papers over time are due to more cross-field references and increased citation rate to higher-impact papers.
  3. Reasons for article retraction in anesthesiology: a comprehensive analysis.
  4. The increasing importance of fellowships and career development awards in the careers of early-stage biomedical academic researchers.
  5. The occurrence of 'Sleeping Beauty' publications in medical research: Their scientific impact and technological relevance.
  6. Immunology and social networks: an approach towards impact assessment.
  7. A bibliometric analysis of the top 50 NIH-Funded colleges of pharmacy using two databases.
  8. How Stable is Early Academic Performance? Using Cluster Analysis to Classify Low Achievement and EF.
  9. Tweeting the meeting: an analysis of Twitter activity at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Annual Scientific Congress from 2015 to 2018.
  10. Trends in Genomics & Informatics: a statistical review of publications from 2003 to 2018 focusing on the most-studied genes and document clusters.
  11. [Analysis of the publication activity of medical massage specialists in the Russian segment of the Internet].
  12. Industrial Applications of Selected JFS Articles.
  13. The historical roots and seminal research on health equity: a referenced publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis.
  14. The Top 100 Highly Cited Original Articles on Immunotherapy for Childhood Leukemia.
  15. An Analysis of Otology-Neurotology Articles from Turkey Published in Science Citation Indexed Otolaryngology Journals from 2012 through 2016.
  16. Top-rated MedEdPublish Articles - July 2019.
  17. Citation doping not for Italy's elites.
  1. J Med Libr Assoc. 2019 Oct;107(4): 597-600
    Bibliometric mapping for current and potential collaboration detection.
    Jordan Wrigley, Virginia Carden, Megan von Isenburg.
      This project characterized current research and collaboration patterns in pain research at one institution after researchers working on a grant application approached the library to better understand current institutional research and publishing about that topic. To address this question, library staff developed a collaborative, multi-tool process for bibliometric analysis and network visualization. The primary data source used was a preexisting, curated EndNote library of institutional publications. This EndNote library was searched using keywords relevant to the topic in order to create two sublibraries: one on pain and one specifically on musculoskeletal pain. Article data from each library were exported into InCites to create a benchmarking analysis. In addition, article data were imported into VOSviewer to visualize collaboration networks by author and create concept maps. Researchers were consulted to identify and label resulting clusters in the VOSviewer visualizations. This project successfully generated useful visualizations via bibliometric mapping that characterized current and potential pain research at the institution. The analysis was included in a grant proposal for funding a center for pain research and for catalyzing further collaborative research.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2019.764
  2. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Oct 14. pii: 201905819. [Epub ahead of print]
    Shorter distances between papers over time are due to more cross-field references and increased citation rate to higher-impact papers.
    Attila Varga.
      The exponential increase in the number of scientific publications raises the question of whether the sciences are expanding into a fractured structure, making cross-field communication difficult. On the other hand, scientists may be motivated to learn extensively across fields to enhance their innovative capacity, and this may offset the negative effects of fragmentation. Through an investigation of the distances within and clustering of cross-sectional citation networks, this study presents evidence that fields of science become more integrated over time. The average citation distance between papers published in the same year decreased from ∼5.33 to 3.18 steps between 1950 and 2018. This observation is attributed to the growth of cross-field communication throughout the entire period as well as the growing importance of high-impact papers to bridge networks in the same year. Three empirical findings support this conclusion. First, distances decreased between almost all disciplines throughout the time period. Second, inequality in the number of citations received by papers increased, and, as a consequence, the shortest paths in the network depend more on high-impact papers later in the period. Third, the dispersion of connections between fields increased continually. Moreover, these changes did not entail a lower level of clustering of citations. Both within- and cross-field citations show a similar rate of slowly growing clustering values in all years. The latter findings suggest that domain-spanning scholarly communication is partly enabled by new fields that connect disciplines.
    Keywords:  citation analysis; complex networks; science of science
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905819116
  3. Can J Anaesth. 2019 Oct 15.
    Reasons for article retraction in anesthesiology: a comprehensive analysis.
    Singh Nair, Chetra Yean, Jennifer Yoo, Jonathan Leff, Ellise Delphin, David C Adams.
      BACKGROUND: Increasing awareness of scientific misconduct has prompted various fields of medicine, including orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, and dentistry to characterize the reasons for article retraction. The purpose of this review was to evaluate the reasons for and the rate of article retraction in the field of anesthesia within the last 30 years.METHODS: Based on a reproducible search strategy, two independent reviewers searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Retraction Watch website to identify retracted anesthesiology articles. Extracted data included: author names, year of publication, year of the retracted article, journal name, journal five-year impact factor, research type (clinical, basic science, or review), reason for article retraction, number of citations, and presence of a watermark indicating article retraction.
    RESULTS: Three hundred and fifty articles were included for data extraction. Reasons for article retraction could be grouped into six broad categories. The most common reason for retraction was fraud (data fabrication or manipulation), which accounted for nearly half (49.4%) of all retractions, followed by lack of appropriate ethical approval (28%). Other reasons for retraction included publication issues (e.g., duplicate publications), plagiarism, and studies with methodologic or other non-fraud data issues. Four authors were associated with most of the retracted articles (59%). The majority (69%) of publications utilized a watermark on the original article to indicate that the article was retracted. Journal Citation Reports journal impact factors ranged from 0.9 to 48.1 (median [interquartile range (IQR)], 3.6 [2.5-4.0]), and the most cited article was referenced 197 times (median [IQR], 13 [5-26]). Most retracted articles (66%) were cited at least once by other journal articles after having been withdrawn.
    CONCLUSIONS: Most retracted articles in anesthesiology literature were retracted because of research misconduct. Limited information is available in the retraction notices, unless explicitly stated, so it is challenging to distinguish between an honest error and research misconduct. Therefore, a standardized reporting process with structured retraction notices is desired.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s12630-019-01508-3
  4. PLoS One. 2019 ;14(10): e0223876
    The increasing importance of fellowships and career development awards in the careers of early-stage biomedical academic researchers.
    Christopher L Pickett.
      Excessive competition for biomedical faculty positions has ratcheted up the need to accumulate some mix of high-quality publications and prestigious grants to move from a training position to university faculty. How universities value each of these attributes when considering faculty candidates is critical for understanding what is needed to succeed as academic faculty. In this study, I analyzed publicly available NIH grant information to determine the grants first-time R01 (FTR01) awardees held during their training period. Increases in the percentage of the FTR01 population that held a training award demonstrate these awards are becoming a more common component of a faculty candidate's resume. The increase was largely due to an expansion of NIH K-series career development awards between 2000 and 2017. FTR01 awardees with a K01, K08, K23, or K99 award were overrepresented in a subset of institutions, whereas FTR01 awardees with F32 fellowships and those with no training award were evenly distributed across institutions. Finally, training awardees from the largest institutions were overrepresented in the faculty of the majority of institutions, echoing data from other fields where a select few institutions supply an overwhelming majority of the faculty for the rest of the field. These data give important insight into how trainees compete for NIH funding and faculty positions and how institutions prefer those with or without training awards.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223876
  5. PLoS One. 2019 ;14(10): e0223373
    The occurrence of 'Sleeping Beauty' publications in medical research: Their scientific impact and technological relevance.
    Anthony F J van Raan, Jos J Winnink.
      We investigate publications in medical research that have gone unnoticed for a number of years after being published and then suddenly become cited to a significant degree. Such publications are called Sleeping Beauties (SBs). This study focuses on SBs that are cited in patents. We find that the increasing trend of the relative number of SBs comes to an end around 1998. However, still a constant fraction of publications becomes an SB. Many SBs become highly cited publications, they even belong to the top-10 to 20% most cited publications in their field. We measured the scaling of the number of SBs in relation to the sleeping period length, during-sleep citation-intensity, and with awakening citation-intensity. We determined the Grand Sleeping Beauty Equation for these medical SBs which shows that the probability of awakening after a period of deep sleep is becoming rapidly smaller for longer sleeping periods and that the probability for higher awakening intensities decreases extremely rapidly. The exponents of the scaling functions show a time-dependent behavior which suggests a decreasing occurrence of SBs with longer sleeping periods. We demonstrate that the fraction of SBs cited by patents before scientific awakening exponentially increases. This finding shows that the technological time lag is becoming shorter than the sleeping time. Inventor-author self-citations may result in shorter technological time lags, but this effect is small. Finally, we discuss characteristics of an SBs that became one of the highest cited medical papers ever.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223373
  6. Rheumatol Int. 2019 Oct 12.
    Immunology and social networks: an approach towards impact assessment.
    José Andrés Ordoñez-Gutiérrez, Juan Manuel Oviedo-Moreno, Daniela Patino-Hernandez, Daniel Gerardo Fernández-Ávila.
      Scientific journals have changed the mechanisms they use for distribution and dissemination of information. Different approaches towards determining impact have emerged and among these, metrics derived from activity on social media are an emerging trend. This article aims to assess whether a correlation exists between the traditional impact factor and activity on social media. We assessed journals categorized within the area of "immunology" on the SCImago Journal and Country Rank website. Variables reflecting traditional and alternative measures of impact were collected. Differences between journals with and without social networks were assessed using non-parametric Mann-Whitney U tests. Correlation was assessed through Spearman tests. 156 journals were analyzed, 17% had at least one social network. 48.2% of journals with social networks were classified within SJR's quartile 1. An almost perfect correlation was found between the SJR and the number of followers on Twitter, this correlation remained statistically significant after adjusting for time since creation of the account [Spearman's correlation (rs) = 0.83]. We propose the use of Twitter as a mechanism for dissemination of information by immunology journals, as well as other social networks for their potential to increase their audience, as well as the dissemination and impact of their publications.
    Keywords:  Immunology; Impact factor; Mass media; Social media; Social networks
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00296-019-04459-6
  7. Res Social Adm Pharm. 2019 Oct 09. pii: S1551-7411(19)30677-1. [Epub ahead of print]
    A bibliometric analysis of the top 50 NIH-Funded colleges of pharmacy using two databases.
    Kyle J Burghardt, Bradley H Howlett, Stephanie M Fern, Paul R Burghardt.
      BACKGROUND: Scholarly productivity is an essential component of college of pharmacy activities and may depend on university rank, faculty type, faculty rank and department. Bibliometric measures provide a means to analyze scholarly productivity from colleges of pharmacy while accounting for these various factors.OBJECTIVES: To analyze bibliometric data from two databases based on Carnegie Research Classification and NIH-funding rank; provide descriptions of bibliometric data based on department type and faculty classification; and examine the distribution of publications in the top 50 NIH-funded Colleges of Pharmacy.
    METHODS: Faculty rosters were gathered for the top 50 NIH-funded colleges of pharmacy, and names were searched in Scopus and Web of Science to establish bibliometric records. Bibliometric indices were compared based on Carnegie Basic Classification and between the NIH funding ranks 1-25 versus 26-50 using WOS bibliometric data. Descriptive statistics were presented, and Pareto distributions were developed for total publications across all schools included.
    RESULTS: Schools in the top 25 for NIH funding and schools with a Carnegie R1 classification had significantly higher bibliometric measures compared to schools ranked 26-50 and schools classified as R2, respectively. For faculty members with a bibliometric record (i.e., at least one publication), 20% provide approximately 60% of the publications. Additionally, approximately 90% of publications are provided by 50% of faculty records. Faculty records from basic science departments, as compared to clinical pharmacy departments, represent the highest contributing groups in the Pareto analysis.
    CONCLUSION: Bibliometric indices are higher at colleges of pharmacy with greater NIH funding or an R1 Carnegie classification. A minority of faculty provides most publications in colleges of pharmacy, which is composed of members from basic science departments. The descriptive data provided here is useful for understanding readily available bibliometric data based on department type and faculty classification and rank.
    Keywords:  Bibliometric; Department; Pharmacy; Publications
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sapharm.2019.10.006
  8. J Learn Disabil. 2019 Oct 18. 22219419881632
    How Stable is Early Academic Performance? Using Cluster Analysis to Classify Low Achievement and EF.
    Adrienne D Woods, Sammy F Ahmed, Benjamin D Katz, Frederick J Morrison.
      We explored whether and how cognitive measures of executive function (EF) can be used to help classify academic performance in Kindergarten and first grade using nonparametric cluster analysis. We found that EF measures were useful in classifying low-reading performance in both grades, but mathematics performance could be grouped into low, average, and high groups without the use of EF tasks. Membership in the high-performing groups was more stable through first grade than membership in the low or average groups, and certain Kindergarten EF tasks differentially predicted first-grade reading and mathematics cluster membership. Our results suggest a stronger link between EF deficits and low performance than between EF strengths and high performance. We highlight the importance of simultaneously using academic and cognitive skills to classify achievement, particularly since existing classification schemes have been largely based on arbitrary cutoffs using limited academic measures.
    Keywords:  academic achievement; cluster analysis; early schooling; educational tracking; executive function; performance classification
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219419881632
  9. ANZ J Surg. 2019 Oct 14.
    Tweeting the meeting: an analysis of Twitter activity at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Annual Scientific Congress from 2015 to 2018.
    Benjamin Gricks, Henry H Woo, Christine Su-Li Lai.
      BACKGROUND: Twitter has been shown to expand the audience and impact of material discussed at medical conferences, however, this phenomenon has not been analysed at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Annual Scientific Congress. The purpose of this study is to document the amount of Twitter activity at the Annual Scientific Congress, and to describe the way delegates use Twitter.METHODS: The number of tweets, retweets and contributors from the 2015 to 2018 congresses were determined using the Twitter advanced search function. Tweets were categorized broadly as academic, social or promotional. Union Metrics, an online software, was used to calculate estimates of impact including impressions and reach at the 2018 congress. Popular topics of discussion at all congresses were defined and counted.
    RESULTS: Twelve thousand five hundred and eight-six tweets were created with the official hashtag at the time of the four congresses. Activity increased over time except in the number of original tweets between the 2016 and 2018 congresses. Sixty-six percent of the tweets were directly related to congress content, and 23% were social in nature. At the 2018 congress, 16-34% of contributors were matched with a congress delegate.
    CONCLUSION: The tweets analysed were mainly informative. Twitter expanded the audience for material discussed at the Annual Scientific Congresses, and the amount of Twitter activity generally increased. It is in the interest of conference organizers to encourage and regulate Twitter use for maximum effectiveness because it is a powerful tool and use is likely to continue increasing in future.
    Keywords:  blogging; communications media; congresses as topic; social media; specialties surgical
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/ans.15474
  10. Genomics Inform. 2019 Sep;17(3): e25
    Trends in Genomics & Informatics: a statistical review of publications from 2003 to 2018 focusing on the most-studied genes and document clusters.
    Ji-Hyeon Kim, Hee-Jo Nam, Hyun-Seok Park.
      Genomics & Informatics (NLM title abbreviation: Genomics Inform) is the official journal of the Korea Genome Organization. Herein, we conduct a statistical analysis of the publications of Genomics & Informatics over the 16 years since its inception, with a particular focus on issues relating to article categories, word clouds, and the most-studied genes, drawing on recent reviews of the use of word frequencies in journal articles. Trends in the studies published in Genomics & Informatics are discussed both individually and collectively.
    Keywords:  document clustering; genes; shallow neural network; word cloud
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5808/GI.2019.17.3.e25
  11. Vopr Kurortol Fizioter Lech Fiz Kult. 2019 ;96(5): 61-65
    [Analysis of the publication activity of medical massage specialists in the Russian segment of the Internet].
    M A Eremushkin, A S Trepova, E A Shilykovskaya.
      AIM: To assess the qualitative and quantitative composition of publications on medical massage, to determine the share of researches among them, and to compare the publication activity of Russian and foreign specialists in this area.MATERIAL AND METHODS: The authors analyzed an original sample of 4532 works published in 1900 to 2019, which met the primary retrieval request 'massage'. The scientific electronic library eLibrary.ru was used as a database. A detailed analysis was carried out among 1522 works, the main content of which was devoted to massage. Publication activity during this period was also assessed.
    RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Publication activity has considerably increased since 2001. There have been 4117 publications, i.e. 90.8% of the entire sample. The share of researches in the Russian Internet segment was 17.47% (266 works) from the analyzed sample, which suggests that there is a lack of attention to the topic of medical massage in Russian professional publications and a need for additional investigations in this area.
    Keywords:  massage; medical massage; medical research; publication activity
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17116/kurort20199605161
  12. J Food Sci. 2019 Oct;84(10): 2702-2704
    Industrial Applications of Selected JFS Articles.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-3841.14262
  13. Int J Equity Health. 2019 Oct 15. 18(1): 152
    The historical roots and seminal research on health equity: a referenced publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis.
    Qiang Yao, Xin Li, Fei Luo, Lianping Yang, Chaojie Liu, Ju Sun.
      BACKGROUND: Health equity is a multidimensional concept that has been internationally considered as an essential element for health system development. However, our understanding about the root causes of health equity is limited. In this study, we investigated the historical roots and seminal works of research on health equity.METHODS: Health equity-related publications were identified and downloaded from the Web of Science database (n = 67,739, up to 31 October 2018). Their cited references (n = 2,521,782) were analyzed through Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS), which detected the historical roots and important works on health equity and quantified their impact in terms of referencing frequency.
    RESULTS: A total of 17 pronounced peaks and 31 seminal works were identified. The first publication on health equity appeared in 1966. But the first cited reference can be traced back to 1801. Most seminal works were conducted by researchers from the US (19, 61.3%), the UK (7, 22.6%) and the Netherlands (3, 9.7%). Research on health equity experienced three important historical stages: origins (1800-1965), formative (1966-1991) and development and expansion (1991-2018). The ideology of health equity was endorsed by the international society through the World Health Organization (1946) declaration based on the foundational works of Chadwick (1842), Engels (1945), Durkheim (1897) and Du Bois (1899). The concept of health equity originated from the disciplines of public health, sociology and political economics and has been a major research area of social epidemiology since the early nineteenth century. Studies on health equity evolved from evidence gathering to the identification of cost-effective policies and governmental interventions.
    CONCLUSION: The development of research on health equity is shaped by multiple disciplines, which has contributed to the emergence of a new stream of social epidemiology and political epidemiology. Past studies must be interpreted in light of their historical contexts. Further studies are needed to explore the causal pathways between the social determinants of health and health inequalities.
    Keywords:  Health equity; Historical roots; Milestone works; Reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS)
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-019-1058-3
  14. Front Pharmacol. 2019 ;10 1100
    The Top 100 Highly Cited Original Articles on Immunotherapy for Childhood Leukemia.
    Qing Zhong, Bing-Hui Li, Qi-Qi Zhu, Zhi-Min Zhang, Zhi-Hao Zou, Ying-Hui Jin.
      Background: Childhood leukemia is one of the most common cancers in children. As a potential treatment for leukemia, immunotherapy has become a new research hotspot. This research aimed at exploring the status and trends of current researches on immunotherapy for childhood leukemia through bibliometric analysis. Methods: The Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science core collection database was searched for articles on immunotherapy and childhood leukemia using a computer. Time period for retrieval was from the beginning of the database to June 15, 2019. The top 100 highly cited articles were selected to extract their information on publication year, authors, title, publication journal, number of citations, author's affiliations, country, and so on. These general information and bibliometric data were collected for analysis. VOSviewer software was used to generate a figure for keywords' co-occurrence network and a figure for researcher's coauthorship network that visualized reference and cooperation patterns for different terms in the 100 articles. Results: The number of citations in the top 100 articles ranged from 17 to 471. These articles were published in 52 different publications. The top four journals in terms of the number of our selected articles were Leukemia (11 articles), Blood (10 articles), Bone Marrow Transplantation (6 articles), and Clinical Cancer Research. The most frequently nominated author was T. Klingebiel from Goethe University Frankfurt, and of the top 100 articles, 12 listed his name. These top 100 articles were published after the year 2000. Most of these articles were original (67%). The United States and Germany were the major countries researching immunotherapy for childhood leukemia and made significant contributions to the combat against the disease. Adoptive immunotherapy and stem cell transplantation appeared more frequently in keywords. Conclusions: This study analyzed the top 100 highly cited articles on immunotherapy for childhood leukemia and provided insights into the features and research hotspots of the articles on this issue.
    Keywords:  VOSviewer; Web of Science; bibliometrics; childhood leukemia; immunotherapy
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2019.01100
  15. Turk Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2019 Sep;57(3): 127-132
    An Analysis of Otology-Neurotology Articles from Turkey Published in Science Citation Indexed Otolaryngology Journals from 2012 through 2016.
    Nadir Yıldırım, Muhammet Fatih Topuz, Aylin Zorlu, Onur Erdoğan, Sinan Aksoy.
      Objective: The objective of this study was to review the articles on otology-neurotology submitted from Turkey and published in Science Citation Indexed (SCI) and Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) journals in the period from 2012 through 2016 in terms of characteristics and quantity, and to analyze the variances in these parameters over the defined time period to profile the national scientific endeavor in the field.Methods: We searched the papers on otology-neurotology and related subjects that were submitted from Turkey and published in the period from 2012 through 2016 in the relevant journals listed in SCI and SCI-E. We noted the impact factors and quartile rankings of the publishing journals, and reviewed, counted and classified the titles, subjects, types and characteristics of the articles that met our criteria.
    Results: A total of 546 papers from Turkey were published in 25 SCI and SCI-E listed journals (145 and 401, respectively) in the defined period. The impact factors of these 25 journals ranged from 0.392 to 2.951. Of these papers, 393 (71.97%) were experimental or observational clinical studies, case reports, or surveys; 137 (25.10%) were non-clinical, laboratory or animal experiments; and the remaining 16 (2.93%) were reviews or letters to the editor.
    Conclusion: A substantial number of papers on otology-neurotology submitted from Turkey were published in many prestigious SCI-journals, however, we did not find any significant increase in this number in the given period. We also found concentration of articles in certain journals and inclination to a few subjects and would like to underline that the number of basic science and ecological-epidemiological studies within the confines of our review were relatively few.
    Keywords:  Otology-neurotology; Science Citation Index; Turkey; bibliometrics
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5152/tao.2019.4027
  16. Med Teach. 2019 Nov;41(11): 1327
    Top-rated MedEdPublish Articles - July 2019.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2019.1657666
  17. Nature. 2019 Oct;574(7778): 333
    Citation doping not for Italy's elites.
    Pietro D'Antuono, Michele Ciavarella.
      
    Keywords:  Publishing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03119-w
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2021‒07‒23 at 10:19:46.