Embedded Files
high-evidence publications by Australasian vascular surgeons over the past two decades, such as the GALA4 and COBEST5 trials, which have had significant impact on clinical practice. There has been some limited data regarding the academic output of other medical cohorts in Australasia,6–8 including orthopaedic surgery and general practice.6–8 Internationally, there are also several studies investigating publication trends in plastic surgery, otolaryngology and cardiac surgery among other specialties.9–11 As of yet, no quantitative assessment of research output has been published in the area of vascular surgery. Furthermore, most existing studies base their analysis upon publications from a defined set of journals, which may not provide a complete representation of the data for the entire cohort of specialists. The aim of this bibliometric study is to provide an objective representation of the research output of all vascular surgeons in Australia and New Zealand over the past two decades, and provide a detailed analysis of the chronological developments and gaps in vascular surgery literature. This information allows the ability to identify high contributors and evaluate future research prospects as a first step for directing resource allocation for future research. A list of all current consultant vascular surgeons in Australia and New Zealand was compiled from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) ‘Find a Surgeon’ website tool12 and correlated with the Australia and New Zealand Society for Vascular Surgery (ANZSVS) database.13 A retrospective search of Scopus was conducted by two independent reviewers in July 2018 to collate, assess and define all publications by Australasian vascular surgeons. Scopus was chosen above others as the primary research database as it possesses an author search function that uses an algorithm to determine authorship based on criteria such as name, affiliation and location. It also produces unique author profiles based on the matched publications and allows analysis of metrics such as Hirsch index (h-index) and citation count. Author profiles were matched if the recorded affiliation corresponded to that of the surgeon, either current or previous. Results were filtered to include only publications within the last 20 years (1998–July 2018). Letters, replies and abstract-only entries were excluded. The gender and location of each surgeon was recorded, as well as their total publication count, citation count, h-index and publication age. Each included entry was assessed for level of evidence using the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) guidelines.14 The year of publication, primary topic covered and surgical technique used for each article was documented. If the topic or technique related to vascular surgery, but did not fit a main category, it was classified as ‘other vascular’. All articles not pertaining to vascular surgery were categorised as ‘non-vascular’. H-index was the chosen metric to reflect each surgeon’s research contribution. It is an unbiased mathematical model, defined as the number (h) of publications which are cited at least h times.15 This allows adjustment for both the quantity and quality of an author’s work, and has been shown to be an accurate and simple measure of each individual’s academic output.16–18 Statistical analysis was performed using Microsoft Excel (2016, v16.0; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA). Tests for significant were performed using the Mann–Whitney U test. In all, 208 consultant vascular surgeons were collated from the RACS website, of which 188 were published authors on Scopus. Over the past two decades, these authors contributed to 2120 publications with a total citation count of 48,650. It is clear that research output by vascular surgeons in Australia and New Zealand is predominantly comprised of level IV evidence publications. This is inclusive of expert opinion articles (12%), literature and narrative reviews (6%), case reports (16%) and case series/audits (23%). Almost a quarter (24%) of publications are case-control or cohort studies, many of which are retrospective articles based on prospectively collected data. High (level I or II) evidence is reflected within only 8% of
Report abuse