Elsevier

World Neurosurgery

Volume 95, November 2016, Pages 565-575
World Neurosurgery

Original Article
Five-Year Institutional Bibliometric Profiles for 119 North American Neurosurgical Residency Programs: An Update

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2016.07.006Get rights and content

Background

We recently performed a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 103 U.S. neurosurgical departments and found the ih(5)-index as meaningful and reproducible using public data. The present report expands this analysis by adding 14 Canadian and 2 additional U.S. programs.

Methods

Departments were included if listed in the American Association of Neurological Surgeons Residency Directory. Each institution was considered a single entity, and original research articles with authors who were neurosurgeon faculty were counted only once per institution, although a single article may have been credited toward multiple institutions, if applicable. The following bibliometric indices were calculated and used to rank departments: ih(5), ig(5), ie(5), and i10(5). In addition, intradepartmental comparison of productivity among faculty members was analyzed by computing Gini coefficients for publications and citations.

Results

The top 5 most academically productive North American neurosurgical programs based on ih(5)-index were found to be the University of Toronto, University of California at San Francisco, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Pittsburgh, and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The top 5 Canadian programs were the University of Toronto, University of Calgary, McGill University, University of Sherbrooke, and University of British Columbia. The median ih(5)-index for U.S. and Canadian programs was 12 and 10.5, respectively.

Conclusions

This is the most accurate comprehensive analysis to date of contemporary bibliometrics among North American neurosurgery departments. Using the ih(5)-index for institutional ranking allows for informative comparison of recent scholarly efforts.

Introduction

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the objective quantification of academic productivity among neurosurgery departments.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Although each of these measures of publication output (or bibliometrics) captures only 1 aspect of a department's productivity, collectively they create a profile that can be used for intradepartmental and interdepartmental analysis, both at a single point in time and longitudinally. Such analysis may be of interest to funding bodies, prospective employees or trainees, and hospital or academic administration. It is therefore essential that appropriate statistics be used, allowing individuals and groups to make the most well-informed decisions.

Numerous metrics, including the h-index and its variations, have been applied to the publication data from neurosurgery departments.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Many of these publications have focused on the lifetime cumulative output of a department's faculty members. Such cumulative statistics can be biased toward early career achievements and do not adequately represent more recent activity, or a lack thereof. In response, we recently introduced several 5-year institutional bibliometric measures to more accurately gauge contemporary academic activity.15 These new benchmarks include the ih(5)-index, ig(5)-index, ie(5)-index, and i10(5)-index. We found the ih(5)-index particularly useful because it was predictive of intradepartmental publication equality yet relatively insensitive to factors that tend to distort other indices, such as outlier faculty who are either highly productive or no longer academically active.

Using these, as well as other measures of academic productivity, we analyzed the 5-year institutional bibliometric profiles for 103 U.S. neurosurgical departments with residency programs.15 The data from that analysis yielded an informative and novel set of institutional rankings. In the current analysis, we extended these methods to include the 14 Canadian neurosurgery departments with residency programs and added analyses of the National Capital Consortium Neurosurgery Residency Program (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, USA)2 and Cleveland Clinic Neurosurgery Residency Program, creating a novel bibliometric analysis and ranking of 119 North American academic neurosurgical departments.

Section snippets

Methods

The following methodologies are identical to those outlined in our previous publication.15

Canadian Programs

The bibliometric characteristics of neurosurgical training programs in Canada (n = 14) are listed in Table 1. The median number of faculty was 13. The median number of total publications was 66.5, with a median of 438.5 total citations. Other median indices were: ih(5) of 10.5, ig(5) of 19.5, ie(5) of 12.5, and i10(5) of 13.5. The median Gini coefficients for publications and citations for the Canadian departments analyzed were 0.58 and 0.74, respectively. Three of 14 programs (21.4%) had a

Discussion

In this report, we provide a comprehensive bibliometric evaluation of nearly all North American academic neurosurgery by adding 14 Canadian programs, The National Capital Consortium Neurosurgery Residency Program (Walter Reed National Military Medical Center),2 and Cleveland Clinic Neurosurgery Residency Program to our previous analysis of 103 U.S. programs. Using the ih(5) index, the University of Toronto ranked first in North America but ranked 26th when correcting for number of faculty.

Our

Conclusions

In this article, we provide an update of our previous report detailing and ranking contemporary publication statistics among 103 U.S. neurosurgical departments. The 14 Canadian neurosurgery departments with residency programs, along with the National Capital Consortium Neurosurgery Residency Program and Cleveland Clinic Neurosurgery Residency Programs, have been individually evaluated and subsequently compiled with our U.S. database to provide the most comprehensive and accurate analysis of

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Andrew J. Gienapp (Department of Medical Education, Methodist University Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee and Department of Neurosurgery, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee) for technical editing and copyediting, preparation of the manuscript for publishing, and publication assistance with the manuscript.

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    Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that the article content was composed in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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