Trends in authorship characteristics and collaboration in pharmacy practice publications: 2011-2020

Impact of COVID-19 on Scholarly Outcomes of Pharmacy Practice Faculty by Gender and Academic Rank

OBJECTIVE

To determine how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the scholarly outcomes of pharmacy practice faculty and whether the impact varied by gender and academic rank.

METHODS

Pharmacy practice faculty from the top 50 National Institutes of Health-funded schools of pharmacy (2018-2021) were included. Faculty whose gender was indeterminable with Gender API or who had no Scopus record were excluded. Publications before and during the pandemic (2018-2019 and 2020-2021, respectively) were obtained from Scopus. Primary outcomes included scholarly activity (probability of publishing) and scholarly output (number of documents published). The secondary outcomes were fractional scholarly output and collaboration coefficient. Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models, with fixed effects including pandemic, rank, and gender. Interaction effects were only included in final models if statistically significant.

RESULTS

Faculty included were 1081 (61.2% women: 31.4%, 40.0%, and 28.7% assistant, associate, and professors, respectively). Unique documents published increased from 2428 to 2737 during the pandemic. There was a significant pandemic-rank interaction in scholarly activity, whereas scholarly output had both pandemic-rank and pandemic-gender interactions. Men had higher scholarly output vs women across all ranks, in both periods. During the pandemic, scholarly output increased among all assistants and associates, but among professors, men had no change, whereas women had a decrease.

CONCLUSION

The pandemic effect on pharmacy practice faculty scholarly outcomes varied across gender and academic ranks. Institutions should implement initiatives to mitigate the extant gender gap in scholarly output that persisted during the pandemic, as it may impact career progression, tenure prospects, and retention.

Enhancing Interoperability for a Sustainable, Patient-Centric Health Care Value Chain: Systematic Review for Taxonomy Development

BACKGROUND

Creating a sustainable, patient-centered health care system necessitates integrated supply chains supported by information technologies. However, achieving interoperability among various devices and systems remains a significant hurdle. Our research highlights the need for systematic reviews that address health care interoperability as a holistic knowledge domain. Notably, we observed a lack of studies that outline its structure or develop a comprehensive, high-order facet-based taxonomy from the perspective of supply or value chains. This study aims to address that gap.

OBJECTIVE

The primary aim of this study is to elucidate the knowledge structure within the extensive domain of health care interoperability, with an emphasis on trending topics, critical hot spots, and the categorization of significant issues. Furthermore, we aim to model the higher-order elements of a taxonomy for health care interoperability within the context of the health care value chain framework.

METHODS

We used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) framework guided our selection process. We examined 6 databases-Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Embase, Cochrane, and PubMed-focusing on journal articles and gray literature published from 2011 onward. Articles were screened using predefined eligibility criteria. Quantitative bibliometric techniques-including cluster, factor, and network analyses-were applied to explore the structure of the knowledge. A subset of articles was selected for qualitative synthesis using an iterative coding process to develop a higher-order facet-based taxonomy.

RESULTS

We identified 370 articles for quantitative analysis. The bibliometric analysis revealed 2 major clusters. Key terms in the first cluster included interoperability, electronic health record, and eHealth-with betweenness centralities of 70.971, 59.460, and 12.000, respectively, and closeness centralities of 0.047, 0.043, and 0.034, respectively. In the second cluster, the most relevant terms were IoT, blockchain, and health care-with betweenness centralities of 6.765, 2.581, and 1.283, respectively, and closeness centralities of 0.034, 0.030, and 0.030, respectively. Factor analysis explained 59.46% of the variance in a 2-factor model, with the first dimension accounting for 36.78% and the second dimension for 22.68%. The qualitative review of 79 articles yielded a taxonomy with 4 higher-order facets: object (what is shared), source (what mechanism is used), ambit (space covered), and content (technology primarily involved). Each facet extended to a third level of classification.

CONCLUSIONS

The comprehensive domain of health care interoperability, viewed through the lens of a sustainable value chain, encompasses studies that highlight various facets or attributes. These studies underscore the relevance of eHealth within this knowledge domain and reflect a strong focus on 2 key health information technologies: electronic health records and the Internet of Things.

A deep neural network model for classifying pharmacy practice publications into research domains

BACKGROUND

Pharmacy practice faculty research profiles extend beyond the clinical and social domains, which are core elements of pharmacy practice. But as highlighted by journal editors in the Granada Statements, there is no consensus on these terms. Four domains (clinical, education, social & administrative, and basic & translational) of pharmacy practice faculty research are proposed.

OBJECTIVES

To develop a classifier for categorizing pharmacy practice faculty publications into four proposed domains, and to compare the model with zero-shot performances of state-of-the-art, general purpose large language models (gpLLMs).

METHODS

One thousand abstracts from 2018 to 2021 documents published by pharmacy practice faculty were reviewed, labelled and used to screen and finetune several Bidirectional Encoders Representations from Transformers (BERT) models. The selected model was compared with zero-shot performances of 7 state-of-the-art gpLLMs including ChatGPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, Claude-3.5, LLAMA-3.1 and Mistral Large, using 80 randomly selected abstracts from 2023 publications labelled with ≥80% consensus by all authors. Classification metrics included F1, recall, precision and accuracy, and reproducibility was measured with Cohen's kappa. A use case was demonstrated by testing the null hypothesis that the research domain distribution of faculty publications was independent of the pandemic.

RESULT

The model - Pharmacy Practice Research Domain Classifier (PPRDC) produced a 5-fold stratified cross-validation metrics of 89.4 ± 1.7, 90.2 ± 2.2, 89.0 ± 1.7, and 95.5 ± 0.6, for F1, recall, precision and accuracy, respectively. PPRDC produced perfectly reproducible classifications (Cohen's kappa = 1.0) and outperformed zero-shot performances of all gpLLMs. F1 scores were 96.2 ± 1.6, 92.7 ± 1.2, 85.8 ± 3.2, and 83.1 ± 9.8 for education, clinical, social, and translational domains, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

PPRDC (https://sadeosun-pprdc.streamlit.app) performed better than gpLLMs in this abstract classification task. Among several other impacts, PPRDC opens a new frontier in bibliometric studies; it will also advance the goals of the Grenada Statements by aiding authors and journal editors in journal selection and article prioritization decisions, respectively.

Comparison of the scientific performance in hip and knee arthroplasty between the leading continents

Background

Scientific progress in the field of knee and hip arthroplasty has enabled the preservation of mobility and quality of life in the case of patients with many primary degenerative and (post-) traumatic joint diseases. This comparative study aims to investigate differences in scientific performance between the leading continents in the field of hip and knee arthroplasty.

Methods

Using specific search terms all studies published by the scientific leading continents Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania listed in the Web of Science databases were included. All identified publications were analysed and comparative conclusions were drawn regarding the qualitative and quantitative scientific merit of each continent.

Results

Europe, followed by North America, Asia, and Oceania, had the highest overall number of publications in the field of arthroplasty. Since 2000, there has been a strong increase in knee arthroplasty publication rate, particular pronounced in Asia. Studies performed and published in North America and those on knee arthroplasty received the highest number of fundings. Publications regarding hip arthroplasty achieved the highest average citation rate. In contradistinction to the others, in North America most funding was provided by private agencies.

Conclusion

Although Europe showed the highest total number of publications, authors and institutions, arthroplasty research from North America received greater scientific attention and financial support. Measured by citations, publications on hip arthroplasty attained higher scientific interest and studies on knee arthroplasty received higher economic affection.