Global Contributions and Trends in Research within the Top-ranked Plastic Surgery Journal

Abstract

Background: We aimed to longitudinally study the relative research contributions of US and international plastic surgeons by evaluating publications within the premier plastic surgery journal over the last 2 decades. We hypothesized that even with an increased pressure to publish in this journal, the relative research contributions from American plastic surgeons will continue to be the largest overall and in all subspecialties. Methods: Data for the surgical subspecialty, corresponding author’s country of origin, and region were extracted from all original articles in 2 randomly selected monthly issues of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery (PRS) from the last 2 decades to evaluate longitudinal trends. Data were also extracted from all of the original articles published in PRS for the last 3 years to analyze the recent distribution of research output. Results: During the last 2 decades, the relative proportion of total original articles written by US authors has increased. They have published proportionally more articles in the Reconstructive and Breast field while publishing relatively less in the hand/peripheral nerve field. From the first decade of analysis, US authors wrote relatively fewer articles in the hand/peripheral nerve field, whereas in the second decade, the US authors wrote relatively fewer articles in the Experimental field. In the last 3 years, US authors published relatively fewer articles in the Experimental and Cosmetic fields. Conclusions: Each country’s scientific productivity in PRS is related to funding, interest, patients’ demand, and healthcare market pressure. In this study, we see that these factors influence trends within research publications over the last 2 decades.

A 20-Year Analysis of Global Authorship Trends in Craniofacial Literature: Is the United States Falling Behind?

“…In fact, though the U.S. was the dominant force behind craniofacial publications 20-years ago, comprising of nearly half of all publications, the proportion of articles from the U.S. has gone down significantly over the past 2 decade, a finding that contradicts prior studies examining research output in a variety of surgical subspecialties. 5–8 Closer examination reveals that this decrease is not due to a decline in the net number of articles, which has nearly doubled over the period. Given that it is not due to declining publication output, there are other possibilities to account for this phenomenon.…”

“…4 For these reasons, the United States (U.S.) has experienced a dramatic increase in academic productivity over the past 2 decades. 5…”

“…4 For these reasons, the United States (U.S.) has experienced a dramatic increase in academic productivity over the past 2 decades. 5 Globalization of medicine has led to further expansion and competition for publications in surgical subspecialties, with growing presence and input from international researchers. 5,6 Although previous studies have demonstrated that the U.S. is consistently the dominant contributor to the literature of surgical specialties such as plastic surgery and orthopedic surgery, other countries in Europe (EU) and Asia are now catching up.…”

Assessment of the Academic Productivity of Plastic Surgeons in Saudi Arabia Using the h-index

“…These findings can be correlated with the study by Esmaeeli et al, where they reviewed original articles in 36 issues of the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery journal from 2016 to 2018. 24 Although researchers from the United States contributed the most to all 6 journal categories, Canadian researchers came the third in breast, pediatric/craniofacial, and hand/peripheral nerve topics. None of the other countries where the cohort in our study finished their training was in the top 3 contributors on each topic.…”

“…In fact, figure 4 in the same article shows that those countries are at a roughly similar level in terms of publication count, whereas Canada is placed at a relatively higher level. 24 It is impractical to pinpoint the causes behind this disparity, as limited data are available in the literature. However, factors such as busy clinical duty due to staff shortage and absence of research-fostering milieu could be implicated, as explained by Hu et al, where they reported that Canadian plastic surgery trainees in the United States had a significantly higher h-index than their peers in Canada.…”