Human capital and productivity in plastic surgery research during COVID-19: An artificial intelligence approach

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented effect on the plastic surgery community across the globe.1Rohrich Rod J. Hamilton Kristy L. Avashia Yash Savetsky Ira The COVID-19 Pandemic: Changing Lives and Lessons Learned.Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open. 2020; 8Crossref Scopus (21) Google Scholar, 2James O. Woolliscroft. Innovation in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis.Academic Medicine. 2020; Google Scholar Karamitros and Goulas (2022) documented each nation’s contribution to plastic surgery research and found a 49.27% increase in publications during the pandemic compared with the previous five-year average.3Georgios Karamitros Sofoklis Goulas Human capital and productivity in plastic surgery research across nations.Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. 2022; : 1-14Google Scholar This study investigates how COVID-related plastic surgery research is distributed across countries and authors. Understanding country differences in COVID- 19-related plastic surgery research is crucial in identifying leaders in emerging research priorities and in gauging each country’s agility to re-deploy resources during a crisis. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Stanford University (#68605). We followed Karamitros and Goulas (2022) in deploying a web-scrapping algorithm on PubMed to retrieve author names, title, and affiliated country for each publication in 2020 and 2021 from the 10 most-cited plastic surgery journals based on the Google Scholar category for “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery” 3Georgios Karamitros Sofoklis Goulas Human capital and productivity in plastic surgery research across nations.Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. 2022; : 1-14Google Scholar, 4Google Scholar Search Engine. Visited on 2022-06-24.. 2Karamitros and Goulas (2022) describe the methodology in detail.2Karamitros and Goulas (2022) describe the methodology in detail. We identified 94.00% of the extracted publications. COVID-19- related articles were identified via text analysis on the titles using the terms: “COVID,” “SARS,” “pandemic,” “corona. 3This allowed us to capture all derivative terms such as “coronavirus,” “corona-virus,” or “corona virus.”3This allowed us to capture all derivative terms such as “coronavirus,” “corona-virus,” or “corona virus.”” It is crucial to represent each country’s research production in the context of its research-producing human capital, proxied by the number of first authors affiliated with that country. First authors are usually researchers of sufficient expertise with the potential to contribute to research in the future. Google Scholar Search Engine. Visited on 2022-06-24. We identified 11,795 publications and 7,665 first authors in 89 countries. We found 493 COVID- 19-related publications (4.18%) from 430 first authors (5.61%) in 40 countries. Eighty-seven percent of COVID authors wrote one COVID-related paper, while the maximum number of papers per author was four. Our results update upwards earlier estimates on the prevalence of COVID-related research in plastic surgery during the pandemic (3.2%).5Boyd Carter J. Hemal Kshipra Bekisz Jonathan M. Salibian Ara A. Choi Mihye Karp Nolan S. Characterizing the Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Plastic Surgery Literature.Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. 2022; 149: 843e-844eCrossref Scopus (0) Google Scholar Figure 1 shows substantial variation in the degree to which plastic surgery research communi- ties re-directed resources to COVID. Table 1 shows that the USA leads in terms of both overall production and human capital, but it devoted only a small fraction of its overall capacity towards COVID-19 research (4.2% of publications and 6.1% of authors) during the pandemic. In contrast, the UK, another major contributor to plastic surgery research, had 14% of its publications and 17.8% of its authors working on COVID-19. We find significant correlations between COVID-19 prevalence per country until the end of 2021 and the share of COVID-19 publications (ρ = 0.325 with p = 0.002 for cases; ρ = 0.263 with p = 0.013 for deaths), and the share of COVID authors (ρ = 0.258 with p = 0.015 for cases; ρ = 0.247 with p = 0.020 for deaths).Table 1Human Capital and Productivity in COVID-19-related Plastic Surgery Research.PublicationsAuthorsRelated to COVID-19Working on COVID-19 ResearchCOVID-19 CasesCOVID-19 DeathsCountry#%Cumulative (%)#%Cumulative (%)(per Million)(per Million)USA1964.239.81696.139.3162,3012,441UK8814.057.67817.857.4191,6472,627Italy377.365.13311.365.1103,7592,327Turkey325.871.6297.671.9111,113965India2310.676.32012.676.524,599340China161.379.5141.679.8813Brazil144.582.4125.582.6103,5322,876Canada93.284.295.184.757,828788Egypt72.985.652.985.83,474196Chile517.986.6211.186.392,1501,995Saudi Arabia58.987.6513.287.415,278244Iran54.488.655.888.669,9531,486South Africa414.889.518.388.857,7401,522Spain43.390.344.189.8132,3581,880Netherlands42.791.143.490.7179,5441,196France42.491.932.391.4147,7301,826Greece38.892.528.091.9116,5972,002Mexico36.093.138.192.631,2132,348Lebanon35.193.7317.693.3132,5981,661Israel33.694.334.994.0146,463872South Korea30.694.920.694.412,260109Sweden24.395.313.194.7124,6321,451Poland23.595.725.395.1103,0732,435Belgium23.096.124.095.6180,6242,431Thailand22.096.623.696.031,012303Australia21.597.022.196.516,25486Germany21.097.421.497.085,7671,343Georgia1100.097.61100.097.2249,6383,686Slovakia133.397.8133.397.4242,9512,948Morocco125.098.0150.097.725,711396Country#%Cumulative (%)#%Cumulative (%)(per Million)(per Million)Czech Republic114.398.2120.097.9235,9193,443Nepal114.398.4125.098.127,119380Azerbaijan112.598.6150.098.459,562807Peru18.398.8125.098.667,4555,953Jordan16.799.019.198.894,2241,121Ireland16.399.217.199.1156,9861,177Malaysia16.399.416.799.381,268928Singapore12.899.614.099.549,566147Taiwan10.699.810.899.871336Japan10.3100.010.4100.013,984148Armenia00.0100.000.0100.0124,0542,867Bahrain00.0100.000.0100.0191,587947Bosnia and Herzegovina00.0100.000.0100.090,0914,157Cameroon00.0100.000.0100.03,91866Cuba00.0100.000.0100.086,157742Ecuador00.0100.000.0100.030,5221,871Ghana00.0100.000.0100.04,27139Guatemala00.0100.000.0100.035,214903Haiti00.0100.000.0100.02,25967Kiribati00.0100.000.0100.0150Lithuania00.0100.000.0100.0190,6972,690Somalia00.0100.000.0100.01,33776Sri Lanka00.0100.000.0100.026,898686Sudan00.0100.000.0100.099271Uzbekistan00.0100.000.0100.05,74443Belarus00.0100.000.0100.073,321585Bulgaria00.0100.000.0100.0110,1614,564Ethiopia00.0100.000.0100.03,40756Hungary00.0100.000.0100.0126,0543,931Kazakhstan00.0100.000.0100.055,290939Libya00.0100.000.0100.057,063838Mongolia00.0100.000.0100.0203,810584Country#%Cumulative (%)#%Cumulative (%)(per Million)(per Million)Tunisia00.0100.000.0100.058,8132,069Ukraine00.0100.000.0100.096,9032,571Grenada00.0100.000.0100.049,2671,594Kuwait00.0100.000.0100.097,715578Philippines00.0100.000.0100.024,611446Slovenia00.0100.000.0100.0218,9072,637Cyprus00.0100.000.0100.0186,189712Nigeria00.0100.000.0100.01,10514UAE00.0100.000.0100.080,704229Croatia00.0100.000.0100.0177,4643,111Qatar00.0100.000.0100.092,956229Indonesia00.0100.000.0100.015,473523Vietnam00.0100.000.0100.017,632330Norway00.0100.000.0100.072,550240Serbia00.0100.000.0100.0189,0901,850Iraq00.0100.000.0100.047,054543Romania00.0100.000.0100.092,0122,989New Zealand00.0100.000.0100.02,7239Argentina00.0100.000.0100.0124,2452,575Austria00.0100.000.0100.0142,1551,881Pakistan00.0100.000.0100.05,495123Russia00.0100.000.0100.071,3162,092Portugal00.0100.000.0100.0135,3001,846Finland00.0100.000.0100.048,880309Colombia00.0100.000.0100.099,4222,505Denmark00.0100.000.0100.0136,410555Switzerland00.0100.000.0100.0152,4651,398Total4934.24305.6Notes: Data cover all publication in 2020 and 2021 from the following journals: AnPS, APS, ASJ, DS, FPSAM, JCD, JCS, JPRAS, PRS, PRSGO. The first (second) three columns show the number of COVID-19 publications (authors), their percentage in each country’s research output (human capital), and their cumulative percentage in global COVID-19 research output (human capital), respectively. The last two columns show each country’s COVID-19 cases and COVID-19-related deaths per million through 2021. Open table in a new tab Notes: Data cover all publication in 2020 and 2021 from the following journals: AnPS, APS, ASJ, DS, FPSAM, JCD, JCS, JPRAS, PRS, PRSGO. The first (second) three columns show the number of COVID-19 publications (authors), their percentage in each country’s research output (human capital), and their cumulative percentage in global COVID-19 research output (human capital), respectively. The last two columns show each country’s COVID-19 cases and COVID-19-related deaths per million through 2021. The results show that a concentrated nucleus of countries and researchers took on COVID- related research. Only six countries are represented in 80% of COVID-19-related plastic surgery publications. This suggests that the capacity to contribute to research during a health crisis may be driven by research resources, incentives, and appetite for publications, which may not be ubiquitous across all research communities. Not required.