Scientific Production and h-Index of Chilean Specialists in Digestive Surgery

Abstract

The Hirsch index (h-index) is recognized as an effective way to summarize, an individual’s scientific research output. However, a benchmark for evaluating surgeon scientists in the field of digestive surgery is still not available. The bibliometric evaluation was conducted on the Scopus Database on all active members joining the Chilean Surgical Society, specifically, digestive surgery specialists. Scientific production was analyzed by considering the number of total publications, number of total citations and h-index; the geographical data for each case was also recorded. The median h-index for the digestive surgeons was 2 (4.3±6.8; range, 0-40); 76.8% of digestive surgeons had at least one scientific journal indexed in Scopus. The 43 surgeons analyzed, jointly published a total of 1011 articles (minimum 1, maximum 434), which were cited 9424 times (range 0 to 5368 citations), with a Median of 30 citations. Additional, 62.5% of digestive surgeons are from the city of Santiago. Of the authors with a higher h-index 3, only two were not from Santiago. The difference in h-index between men and women was statistically significant. Bibliometric analysis of the scientific production in digestive surgery may facilitate the recognition of factors that may further enhance research activity and clinical performance, and be useful for a comparative assessment of authors or research groups in terms of quality and quantity of the scientific production.