The methodological quality of 176,620 randomized controlled trials published between 1966 and 2018 reveals a positive trend but also an urgent need for improvement.

Many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are biased and difficult to reproduce due to methodological flaws and poor reporting. There is increasing attention for responsible research practices and implementation of reporting guidelines, but whether these efforts have improved the methodological quality of RCTs (e.g., lower risk of bias) is unknown. We, therefore, mapped risk-of-bias trends over time in RCT publications in relation to journal and author characteristics. Meta-information of 176,620 RCTs published between 1966 and 2018 was extracted. The risk-of-bias probability (random sequence generation, allocation concealment, blinding of patients/personnel, and blinding of outcome assessment) was assessed using a risk-of-bias machine learning tool. This tool was simultaneously validated using 63,327 human risk-of-bias assessments obtained from 17,394 RCTs evaluated in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). Moreover, RCT registration and CONSORT Statement reporting were assessed using automated searches. Publication characteristics included the number of authors, journal impact factor (JIF), and medical discipline. The annual number of published RCTs substantially increased over 4 decades, accompanied by increases in authors (5.2 to 7.8) and institutions (2.9 to 4.8). The risk of bias remained present in most RCTs but decreased over time for allocation concealment (63% to 51%), random sequence generation (57% to 36%), and blinding of outcome assessment (58% to 52%). Trial registration (37% to 47%) and the use of the CONSORT Statement (1% to 20%) also rapidly increased. In journals with a higher impact factor (>10), the risk of bias was consistently lower with higher levels of RCT registration and the use of the CONSORT Statement. Automated risk-of-bias predictions had accuracies above 70% for allocation concealment (70.7%), random sequence generation (72.1%), and blinding of patients/personnel (79.8%), but not for blinding of outcome assessment (62.7%). In conclusion, the likelihood of bias in RCTs has generally decreased over the last decades. This optimistic trend may be driven by increased knowledge augmented by mandatory trial registration and more stringent reporting guidelines and journal requirements. Nevertheless, relatively high probabilities of bias remain, particularly in journals with lower impact factors. This emphasizes that further improvement of RCT registration, conduct, and reporting is still urgently needed.

Developing a Cancer-Focused Library Survey - Assessing the Current Environment and Planning for the Future.

The primary goal of this project is to understand how each National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center library, and all libraries that support cancer research, function within their institutions. Through an in-depth survey focused on three major areas (staff, content and tools procurement, and user services), the research team hopes to determine how a cancer-centric library can be successful in supporting quality patient care, research excellence, and education. Additionally, the survey will examine the necessary minimum staffing levels for librarians and information professionals based on organizational size and degree of research focus. The survey will seek out the new skills librarians will need to deliver optimal services. The survey will also explore how content libraries purchase reflects and maps to constituents' current medical and research activities. Libraries within a research intense environment have a responsibility to align with researchers and health care professionals to provide resources and services that support their workflows. Cancer libraries need to be attuned to their institutions' missions, whether that includes excellent patient care, research endeavors, or cutting-edge educational programs. The information gathered from the survey will provide data for this research team to define the vision and standards of excellence for a cancer specialized research library.

Translating the Cochrane EMBASE RCT filter from the Ovid interface to Embase.com: a case study.

BACKGROUND: Information specialists frequently translate search filters from one interface to another. Publications advise that translation can be complex and should be undertaken carefully. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the issues arising when translating the Cochrane Embase RCT search filter from one interface (Ovid) to another (Embase.com). METHODS: We drafted a translation of the Cochrane Ovid RCT filter to run in Embase.com. We compared the line-by-line results of the Ovid filter with the results of the translation. We revised the filter. We identified differences between database versions including records with different publication years and subject headings. Some records were in Embase in one interface but not in the other. We encountered expected interface differences relating to proximity operators. We also encountered unexpected interface issues around truncation and the use of the original title or original abstract field. DISCUSSION: Filter conversion is challenging and time consuming revealing unexpected differences in interfaces and databases. Careful planning can pre-empt some issues, but others may only emerge during testing. We identified interface anomalies that have led database publishers to review aspects of the way their interfaces work. CONCLUSIONS: Translators should be vigilant for known and unknown differences in both interfaces and database versions.

Analysis of Production, Impact, and Scientific Collaboration on Difficult Airway Through the Web of Science and Scopus (1981-2013).

BACKGROUND: Bibliometrics, the statistical analysis of written publications, is an increasingly popular approach to the assessment of scientific activity. Bibliometrics allows researchers to assess the impact of a field, or research area, and has been used to make decisions regarding research funding. Through bibliometric analysis, we hypothesized that a bibliometric analysis of difficult airway research would demonstrate a growth in authors and articles over time. METHODS: Using the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases, we conducted a search of published manuscripts on the difficult airway from January 1981 to December 2013. After removal of duplicates, we identified 2412 articles. We then analyzed the articles as a group to assess indicators of productivity, collaboration, and impact over this time period. RESULTS: We found an increase in productivity over the study period, with 37 manuscripts published between 1981 and 1990, and 1268 between 2001 and 2010 (P < .001). The difficult airway papers growth rate was bigger than that of anesthesiology research in general, with CAGR (cumulative average growth rate) since 1999 for difficult airway >9% for both WoS and Scopus, and CAGR for anesthesiology as a whole =0.64% in WoS, and =3.30% in Scopus. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between the number of papers published per author and the number of coauthored manuscripts (P < .001). We also found an increase in the number of coauthored manuscripts, in international cooperation between institutions, and in the number of citations for each manuscript. For any author, we also identified a positive relationship between the number of citations per manuscript and the number of papers published (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: We found a greater increase over time in the number of difficult airway manuscripts than for anesthesiology research overall. We found that collaboration between authors increases their impact, and that an increase in collaboration increases citation rates. Publishing in English and in certain journals, and collaborating with certain authors and institutions, increases the visibility of manuscripts published on this subject.

Multispecialty involvement in the management of type B aortic dissections in the endovascular era-Implications for training cardiothoracic residents.

PURPOSE: Involvement of qualified specialists with proficiency in endovascular therapies has created flux regarding the role of cardiothoracic surgeons, vascular surgeons, and other catheter-skilled specialists in the management of type B aortic dissections. We used manuscript authorship trends and recent match data in order to study how multi-specialty involvement in treating aortic dissections has changed in the endovascular era. METHODS: A PubMed review of published literature between 1998 and 2015 was performed with "aortic dissection" in the title. Case studies and entries with incomplete author or identifying information were excluded. Author number, specialty affiliation, and treatment focus were recorded. Available residency match data were obtained from the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). RESULTS: Cardiothoracic surgeons represented 38.5% (10/23) of the authors for papers with an endovascular focus in 1998 compared with 27.7% (59/213) in 2015. Vascular surgeons represented 19.2% (5/23) and 37.1% (79/213) of authors in 1998 and 2015, respectively. Radiologists accounted for 30.4% (7/23) of authorship in 1998 and 8.9% (19/213) in 2015. NRMP match data revealed a 10.6% decrease in thoracic surgery matches from 2004 to 2015, while vascular surgery and interventional radiology increased by 74.7% and 191.1%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Endovascular technologies have resulted in significant changes as to which specialties manage complicated type B aortic dissections. Vascular surgeons, with both open and extensive endovascular training are optimally positioned to assume a major role in the care of aortic dissection patients. Continued emphasis on endovascular training and multispecialty collaboration is essential for cardiothoracic surgeons in the endovascular era.

Citation rates for experimental psychology articles published between 1950 and 2004: top-cited articles in behavioral cognitive psychology.

From citation rates for over 85,000 articles published between 1950 and 2004 in 56 psychology journals, we identified a total of 500 behavioral cognitive psychology articles that ranked in the top 0.6% in each half-decade, in terms of their mean citations per year using the Web of Science. Thirty nine percent [corrected] of these articles were produced by 78 authors who authored three or more of them, and more than half were published by only five journals.The mean number of cites per year and the total number of citations necessary for an article to achieve various percentile rankings are reported for each journal. The mean number of citations necessary for an article published within each half-decade to rank at any given percentile has steadily increased from 1950 to 2004. Of the articles that we surveyed, 11% had zero total citations, and 35% received fewer than four total citations. Citations for post-1994 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles have generally continued to grow across each of their 3-year postpublication bins. For pre-1995 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles, citations peaked in the 4- to 6- or 7- to 9-year postpublication bins and decreased linearly thereafter, until asymptoting. In contrast, for the top-500 articles, (a) for pre-1980 articles, citations grew and peaked 10-18-year postpublication bins, and after a slight decrease began to linearly increase again; (b) for post-1979 articles, citations have continually increased across years in a nearly linear fashion. We also report changes in topics covered by the top-cited articles over the decades.

A Bibliometric Network Analysis of Coronavirus during the First Eight Months of COVID-19 in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society. Researchers worldwide have been working to provide new solutions to and better understanding of this coronavirus. In this research, our goal was to perform a Bibliometric Network Analysis (BNA) to investigate the strategic themes, thematic evolution structure and trends of coronavirus during the first eight months of COVID-19 in the Web of Science (WoS) database in 2020. To do this, 14,802 articles were analyzed, with the support of the SciMAT software. This analysis highlights 24 themes, of which 11 of the more important ones were discussed in-depth. The thematic evolution structure shows how the themes are evolving over time, and the most developed and future trends of coronavirus with focus on COVID-19 were visually depicted. The results of the strategic diagram highlight 'CHLOROQUINE', 'ANXIETY', 'PREGNANCY' and 'ACUTE-RESPIRATORY-SYNDROME', among others, as the clusters with the highest number of associated citations. The thematic evolution. structure presented two thematic areas: "Damage prevention and containment of COVID-19" and "Comorbidities and diseases caused by COVID-19", which provides new perspectives and futures trends of the field. These results will form the basis for future research and guide decision-making in coronavirus focused on COVID-19 research and treatments.

[Information resources in medicine: present and future trends]. / Recursos de información en medicina: presente y perspectivas de futuro.

We are immersed in a new paradigm for scientific information access that, in the future, will be only be available and transmitted in electronic format. The concept of using internet as information storage has changed, with emphasis on its interactivity and possibility to share contents. The Web 2.0 has revolutionized the way of internet is understood, promoting the participation of those who access it, collaborating in its construction per se through intuitive and easy-to-use tools. Medicine 2.0 means supposes the participation of the user in the design, selection and evaluation of the contents. The future of access to information is through Medicine 2.0 services. The aim of this paper is to review the tools and instruments available for health care professionals to access scientific information, with special emphasis on web 2.0 tools.

[How to help and promote Hungarian medical publications?]. / Hogyan tegyük ismertebbé hazai orvostudományunkat? Hungarian Citator.

The journal impact factor (IF) is often recognized as a symbol of scientific prestige and relevance. However it is greatly influenced by the field or scope of journals, publisher, scientific, editorial, and economic background. Although there are many suggestions to modify the most important scientometric parameter, it is widely used to compare journals, individuals, departments, scientific outputs to judge academic promotions, grant allocations, awarding appointments. Most of the researchers use international database searching relevant publication, which will be cited in their own paper. Unfortunately these international databases refer only few Hungarian journals. It is recommended to develop and maintain a Hungarian Electronic Medical Bibliography, divided by the field of scientific interest (e.g., diabetology, gastroenterology, public health, urology etc.). Authors can upload the list or full text of publications, if copyright agreements allow, and search other Hungarian papers for citation, to promote each others. Organizer, manager, host and supporters of this database are very welcomed.

Frontiers of biomedical text mining: current progress.

It is now almost 15 years since the publication of the first paper on text mining in the genomics domain, and decades since the first paper on text mining in the medical domain. Enormous progress has been made in the areas of information retrieval, evaluation methodologies and resource construction. Some problems, such as abbreviation-handling, can essentially be considered solved problems, and others, such as identification of gene mentions in text, seem likely to be solved soon. However, a number of problems at the frontiers of biomedical text mining continue to present interesting challenges and opportunities for great improvements and interesting research. In this article we review the current state of the art in biomedical text mining or 'BioNLP' in general, focusing primarily on papers published within the past year.

Worldwide tendency and focused research in forensic anthropology: A bibliometric analysis of decade (2008-2017).

PURPOSE: The objective of this study was to illustrate the global research productivity and tendency of forensic anthropology in recent ten years (2008-2017) by bibliometric analysis. METHODS: "Forensic anthropology" was used as the Medical Subject Headings term and topic in PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection. RESULTS: As 5130 articles retrieved, two independent investigators evaluated all of them respectively. After restricting the published year, excluding duplicated and irrelevant articles, 1663 articles were available. The total of 219 countries and regions contributed to this research and the United States was the most productive country. There were 201 peer-reviewed journals including all of articles and two of them were identified as core journals according to Bradford's law. Eight of the top 10 productive authors were from developed countries. The top 10 cited articles were published by authors from developed countries with half in the United States. Sex estimation and age estimation were the most popular topics. CONCLUSIONS: With the basic and recognized methodology administered in this study, it provided a relative broad view to evaluate the scientific research capacity of forensic anthropology and reveal the worldwide tendency in this field.

Relación entre la enfermedad periodontal y la enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica: revisión bibliográfica / Relationship between periodontal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a bibliographic review

Introducción: la enfermedad periodontal y la enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica son patologías de origen inflamatorio crónico y progresivo que afectan a pacientes de edad avanzada, fumadores con mal estado de salud oral, encontrándose una correlación por el grado de severidad en la enfermedad periodontal sobre aquellos individuos con presencia de enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica (EPOC) y exacerbaciones. Objetivos: determinar la relación de la enfermedad periodontal y la enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica, explicando los factores de riesgo que intervienen en estas enfermedades. Material y métodos: se realizó una búsqueda en los principales buscadores de datos digitales: PubMed, SciELO, Science Direct, BMC, Journal of Periodontology, Web of Science y Scopus. Se escogieron artículos publicados en los últimos cinco años; se excluyeron artículos incompletos y que no se relacionan al tema. En el resultado de la búsqueda, 45 artículos cumplieron con el propósito de la revisión bibliográfica. Resultados: en esta revisión bibliográfica, se obtuvo que 18 artículos comprueban la relación de la enfermedad periodontal y la enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica. Conclusiones: se ha comprobado la relación entre la enfermedad periodontal y enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica. Se requiere el análisis de más estudios para determinar una relación directa entre estas dos enfermedades e incluir variables como la edad y el tratamiento (AU)

Introduction: periodontal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are diseases of chronic and progressive inflammatory origin that affect elderly patients, smokers with poor oral health, finding a correlation by the degree of severity in periodontal disease on those individuals with the presence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and exacerbations. Objectives: to determine the relationship between periodontal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease explaining the risk factors involved in these diseases. Material and methods: a search was carried out in the main digital data search engines: PubMed, SciELO, Science Direct, BMC, Journal of Periodontology, Web of Science, and Scopus, articles published in the last 5 years were chosen, incomplete articles and those not related to the subject were excluded, in the result of the search 45 articles fulfilled the purpose of the bibliographic review. Results: in this literature review it was obtained that 18 articles, prove the relationship between periodontal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Conclusions: the relationship between periodontal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been proved. More studies are needed to determine a direct relationship between these two diseases and to include variables such as age and treatment (AU)

Conceptual knowledge acquisition in biomedicine: A methodological review.

The use of conceptual knowledge collections or structures within the biomedical domain is pervasive, spanning a variety of applications including controlled terminologies, semantic networks, ontologies, and database schemas. A number of theoretical constructs and practical methods or techniques support the development and evaluation of conceptual knowledge collections. This review will provide an overview of the current state of knowledge concerning conceptual knowledge acquisition, drawing from multiple contributing academic disciplines such as biomedicine, computer science, cognitive science, education, linguistics, semiotics, and psychology. In addition, multiple taxonomic approaches to the description and selection of conceptual knowledge acquisition and evaluation techniques will be proposed in order to partially address the apparent fragmentation of the current literature concerning this domain.

Medical informatics and bioinformatics: a bibliometric study.

This paper reports on an analysis of the bioinformatics and medical informatics literature with the objective to identify upcoming trends that are shared among both research fields to derive benefits from potential collaborative initiatives for their future. Our results present the main characteristics of the two fields and show that these domains are still relatively separated.

Scientific production of electronic health record research, 1991-2005.

PURPOSE: The increasing numbers of publications on electronic health record (EHR) indicate its increasing importance in the world. This study attempted to quantify the scientific production of EHR research articles, and how they have changed over time, in an effort to investigate changes in the trends cited in these critical evaluations. METHOD: The articles were based on the science citation index (SCI) from 1991 to 2005. A descriptive study was performed using the 1803 documents published in the SCI from 39 countries in America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The evaluation was based on parameters including document type, language, first author's country of origin, number of citations and citations per publication. RESULTS: Of all publications, 1455 (80.7%) were articles, followed by meeting abstracts which represented about one-tenth of all types of EHR publications. Numbers of published articles have significantly increased when compared by each 5-year period. Most articles were published in English (98%) and were from the region of America (57%). The top 10 of the 374 journals accounted for 41% of the number of published articles. The US dominates publication production (57%) with a cumulative impact factor (IF) of 2227 and followed by the UK (8.5%, with a cumulative IF of 257.0) and the Netherlands (7.8%, with a cumulative IF of 211.1). An analysis of the number of articles related to population revealed a high publication output for relative small countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Norway. CONCLUSIONS: Research production in EHR showed a considerable increase during 1991-2005. The production was dominated by articles, those from the US, and those published in English. The production came from many countries, denoting the devotion to this field in different areas around the world.