Trends in Academic Spine Neurosurgeon Productivity as Measured by the Relative Citation Ratio

Evaluation of the National Institutes of Health–supported relative citation ratio among American orthopedic spine surgery faculty: A new bibliometric measure of scientific influence

“…In addition, although one would expect longer career duration to be associated with greater publication counts and higher overall weighted RCR scores, we did not find a significant relationship (p= .54 and p=.216) and was also seen in the study of spine neurosurgeons by Grogan et al which additionally did not show a relationship between career duration and mean or weighted RCR (p=0.397 and p=.735, respectively) 6 . This is in contrast to the findings reported for academic radiation oncologists 14 , neurosurgeons 3 , and spine trained neurosurgeons 6 . One possible explanation for this could be the increase in international competition for publishing in U.S Spine journals 15 .…”

“…This suggests that while those of higher academic rank may have greater overall research productivity (i.e., higher weighted RCR scores), the quality of publications is similar regardless of academic position (i.e., no difference in mean RCR). These findings are in contrast to academic neurosurgery spine surgeons, who's median and weighted RCR scores have been shown to increase with advancing academic rank ( 3,6 as has been similarly seen with h-index analysis 16 . These findings represent a specialty-specific distinction between research impact amongst those of different academic positions within the fields of neurosurgery spine and orthopedic spine surgery.…”

“…However, it is important to note that the majority of OSS faculty members in our study were male (96.4%), which limits the accuracy of our findings. Underrepresentation of female faculty were similarly reported amongst academic neurosurgery spine surgeons (6.42%) 6 , academic neurosurgeons (9%) 3 , and radiation oncologists (31%) 14 . Upon further sex-specific analysis, Grogan et al found that the observed differences in research impact and productivity amongst male and female neurosurgery spine surgeons was likely due to the underrepresentation of women in positions of higher rank.…”

“…Historically, the academic output of an individual or department has been measured by publication count, publication type, or the amount of funding received through research grants 4 . The Hirsch index (H-index) has been the most commonly utilized citation-based bibliometric 4 used to quantify research productivity and scientific impact within the field of orthopedic surgery 3,[5][6][7] ,. However, the H-index has been scrutinized for its simplicity and lack of field normalization, which limits accurate crossspecialty comparisons of research productivity 8 .…”

Root Canal Disinfection Articles with the Highest Relative Citation Ratios. A Bibliometric Analysis from 1990 to 2019

“…Although the application of the RCR system is relatively new, and direct comparisons among fields are still developing, the expectations for RCR in bibliometric analysis are great and growing, given its documented usefulness [ 38 ]. The RCR was originally designed to assess the scientific impact of NIH-funded research; but it was soon adopted for bibliometric analyses beyond this intended purpose, for instance, to measure the research productivity of scientists or clinicians [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ], to evaluate the characteristics of clinical trials [ 45 ], or to evaluate the most influential articles [ 46 ].…”