Assessing the academic achievement of United States orthopaedic departments

BACKGROUND

Assessing academic productivity allows academic departments to identify the strengths of their scholarly contribution and provides an opportunity to evaluate areas for improvement.

AIM

To provide objective benchmarks for departments seeking to enhance academic productivity and identify those with significant improvement in recent past.

METHODS

Our study retrospectively analyzed a cohort of orthopaedic faculty at United States-based academic orthopaedic programs. 5502 full-time orthopaedic faculty representing 178 programs were included in analysis. Variables included for analysis were National Institutes of Health funding (2014-2018), leadership positions in orthopaedic societies (2018), editorial board positions of top orthopaedic journals (2018), total number of publications and Hirsch-index. A weighted algorithm was used to calculate a cumulative score for each academic program. This study was performed at a large, United States medical school.

RESULTS

All 178 programs included in analysis were evaluated using the comprehensive weighted algorithm. The five institutions with the highest cumulative score, in decreasing order, were: Washington University in St. Louis, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Sidney Kimmel Medical College (SKMC) at Thomas Jefferson University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Brigham and Women’s/Harvard. The five institutions with the highest score per capita, in decreasing order, were: Mayo Clinic (Rochester), Washington University in St. Louis, Rush University, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and MGH/Brigham and Women’s/Harvard. The five academic programs that had the largest improvement in cumulative score from 2013 to 2018, in decreasing order, were: VCU, SKMC at Thomas Jefferson University, UCSF, MGH/Brigham and Women’s/Harvard, and Brown University.

CONCLUSION

This algorithm can provide orthopaedic departments a means to assess academic productivity, monitor progress, and identify areas for improvement as they seek to expand their academic contributions to the orthopaedic community.

The Hirsch-index: a simple, new tool for the assessment of scientific output of individual scientists: The case of Dutch professors in clinical cardiology

In this brief paper we explore the Hirsch-index together with a couple of other bibliometric parameters for the assessment of the scientific output of 29 Dutch professors in clinical cardiology. It appears that even within such a homogeneous group there is large interindividual variability. Although the differences are quite remarkable, it remains undetermined what they mean; at least it is premature to interpret them as differences in scientific quality. It goes without saying that even more prudence is required when different fields of medicine and life sciences are compared (for example within University Medical Centres). Recent efforts to produce an amalgam of scientific 'productivity', 'relevance' and 'viability' as a surrogate parameter for the assessment of scientific quality, as for example performed in the AMC in Amsterdam, should be discouraged in the absence of a firm scientific base. Unfortunately for politicians and 'managers of science' only reading papers and studying are suitable for quality assessment of scientific output. Citations analyses can't substitute that. (Neth Heart J 2009;17:145-54.).