N. Desai1, L. V. Veras1, A. Gosain1 1Univeristy Of Tennessee Health Science Center,Surgery,Memphis, TN, USA
Introduction:
While Pediatric Surgery is a small discipline, advances in the field expand upon discoveries made within many other disciplines, making it challenging for the practitioner to keep pace with advancing knowledge. Bradford’s Law of Scattering defines an exponentially diminishing return when extending a search for references in journals, and can be used to identify the “core” journals in a field. The purpose of this study was to identify the core journals of Pediatric Surgery.
Methods:
With IRB approval, we identified the top academically-productive Pediatric Surgeons in the US (5-year h-index >1 SD above the mean for Pediatric Surgeons at US Fellowship Training Programs). Scopus was used to gather each author’s publication history, # of publications, # of citations, lifetime and 5-year h-index, journals in which authors published, # of references/publication, and the journals each of those references were found in. The verbal formulation of Bradford’s law, which states that journals can be divided into p zones: c:ck:ck^2…ck^(p-1) where c is the number of core journals, and k is the Bradford multiplier between zones, was used to identify the core journals for p=3-8 zones. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was determined for actual vs. theoretical distributions.
Results:
We identified 69 Pediatric Surgeons (28±1.4 lifetime, 10±0.2 5-year h-index). These authors published 10031 articles(145±11/surgeon) which were cited 250841(3635±413/surgeon) times. The top 5 journals in which Pediatric Surgeons published were Journal of Pediatric Surgery, Journal of Surgical Research, Pediatric Surgery International, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, and Annals of Surgery. Pediatric Surgeons’ articles contained 199507 references(2891±176/surgeon). We analyzed 58310 references from the top 20 journals in which each Pediatric Surgeon published. Bradford’s law identified a single core journal for all values of p=3-8, with p=3 providing the best correlation between predicted and actual values(R^2=0.9996). The core journal for Pediatric Surgery is Journal of Pediatric Surgery (Figure).
Conclusion:
We utilized Bradford’s law to identify the core journals of Pediatric Surgery. These core journals include the two leading Pediatric Surgery-specific journals, as well as the highest impact factor journals in Surgery (Annals of Surgery) and Medicine (NEJM). These findings can help busy Pediatric Surgeons focus their reading to stay current in a rapidly evolving field.
