JOHN KIMBROUGH


You thank you for talking to us so your work as I understand. It is the citation analysis of the of. What's been written about this disease in the last 45 years. Yes we took we did. A data search of all the articles that have been published since 1970 on cutaneous t-cell lymphoma and then looked more closely at the top 100 articles as defined by. How many citations the articles had so the top 100 highly cited articles that dealt with cutaneous t-cell lymphoma and then trying to discover what we can glean by further analyzing those articles where they were published what countries they were published in who the authors were. And if we could really mine any data out of that so book you had mentioned that they were well over five thousand in that period of time but yeah 100 fell out is the top top one so tell me what what did that analysis show well for me as a librarian one of the things that struck me was how interdisciplinary in nature the research for cutaneous t'look t-cell lymphoma is obviously we were expecting to find a lot of high impact or journals and dermatology being where the top 100 we published in and of course some other high-impact medical journals like the new england journal of medicine but we actually found a wide range of publishing venues for these highly cited articles everything from blood which has both dermatology and non dermatology articles to immunology journals like the journal of experimental medicine and the journal of immunology to things like virology which isn't may be terribly surprising given the topic given that lymphoma falls at the intersection of dermatology and immunology and other related fields but it reminds me just how wide-ranging a medical researcher has to be when they read articles and try and stay current with the literature. What do you think would be impact on on information gathering or resources from universities well it's a good reminder that medical research is not a narrowly specialized field that one really needs to read widely in a wide range of fields in order to stay current on research and treatment as for a particular condition or problem and it's a good reminder to people that are practicing in the field that often the most groundbreaking research may not be published in a narrow ly specialized venue that there might be lots of different places where research that's relevant to your field that's going on.

Do you have any tips for those of us who are seeking out information to get to the most. Relevant data across specialties. This particular method is one of several ways that we encourage folks to kind of familiarize themselves with the literature in a given field. Obviously you can do search hub med and seeing what comes up as far as relevant articles but another approach is to look at. What's been highly cited in the field and then look at those articles and see what those articles are citing and go from there does pubmed have that built into it already when you get that little bar at the side that has the related articles is that based on citation or a subject the related articles in PubMed that you're getting is based on keywords and relevance so it's one way to get relevant articles it's a different method than the one we were using and in this paper for this. We used a tool called web of science another tool that does this as scopus. Those are the two big tools that do citation analysis. Can we get those through our university libraries or yes they're directly on. They are commercially available databases. So your library. Praise a pretty penny for them but most major medical research libraries have one or both of those tools available for you to use and you use a search term and get the articles based on numbers. Yes as an information specialist. What do you think the value is of number of citations well. I think there's a nice value in that you can determine what's kind of the high-impact articles in a given field there are a couple of caveats. I draw around that number one.

It usually takes a few years for articles to build up a citation count. So what you're seeing and especially the said that we got of the top citation classics is. You're not seeing the very current research because that just came out and it hasn't had a chance to be cited in subsequent papers yet. The other issue is that our citation analysis doesn't look at the impact first authored versus middle authored papers. So when we look at an author that might appear a lot in our citation classics. We don't know if that author has been first author on all those papers or if they've been somewhere in there as well so yeah so those are doesn't be a couple of a couple of things to do to keep in mind and I noticed that in your analysis you looked at the authors specifically in the top hundred and I can tell from many of the names that many of them are dermatologists but you didn't sub categorize it based on their prime reason didn't didn't get that be an interesting next step. Yeah to do with our research yeah but I also noticed that the great majority well the United States was the the highest representative of any country and and that the of the journals that you looked at really work number one hematology but from the US and from lots of dermatologists and then number two the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology so well. It's great to know about those resources. It's great to be able to talk to an information specialist. Thank you it was. It was wonderful to be able to participate in this project. We love to collaborate and partner with researchers and clinicians on their research.