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Objective: Oral cancer and precancers are a major public health challenge in developing countries. Researchers in Saudi Arabia have constantly been directing their efforts on oral cancer research and have their results published. Systematic analysis of such papers is the need of the hour as it will not only acknowledge the current status but will also help in framing future policies on oral cancer research in Saudi Arabia., Method: The search string "oral cancer" OR "Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma" OR "oral premalignant lesion" OR "oral precancer" OR "Oral Potentially malignant disorder" AND AFFIL (Saudi AND Arabia ) was used for retrieval of articles from Scopus database. Various tools available in Scopus database were used for analyzing the bibliometric related parameters., Results: The search revealed a total of 663 publications based on the above query. Maximum affiliations were from King Saud University (163) followed by Jazan University (109) and then King Abdulaziz University (106). A large number of international collaborations were observed, the maximum with India (176) and the USA (127). The maximum number of articles were published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention (34) followed by the Journal of Contemporary Dental Practice (33) and Journal of Oral Pathology and Medicine (19)., Conclusion: Saudi researchers are directing their efforts towards the public health menace of oral cancer. However, it was also observed that some institutions have emerged as front runners in research, whereas others are contributing significantly less. The health department should encourage and take necessary steps to increase the involvement of other institutions.

Aim: Better training in scientific skills, such as the ability to conduct research independently, has been one of the main drivers of reform in medical education. The aim of this article is to report on the scientific term paper module in the modular curriculum of medicine (MCM) at the Charité. This module is an established example of undergraduate medical students conducting their own scientific investigations. Project outline: A faculty-wide, outcome-oriented process resulted in a four-week module for writing a scientific term paper in the 6 th semester of the MCM as part of a longitudinal science curriculum. Acquired competencies were assessed through a written term paper and an oral presentation. Two student cohorts (winter terms 2013 and 2014) were surveyed on how they rated the module concept, organizational aspects and the quality of support. We further analysed the chosen topics of the papers as well as student assessment results. Results: The student evaluation (return rates of 193 and 197, 71% and 77%) showed high overall satisfaction with the module. This result was evident in the high rating of the module concept and organizational aspects, a positive attitude towards scientific research, and strong motivation to pursue further scientific research. There was a wide spectrum of term paper topics with a focus on literature reviews. Most of the student work was assessed as good or very good. Conclusion: The scientific term paper module has proven itself as a curricular concept for students to perform own scientific research in the MCM, with strong acceptance and good performance by students. This project report can serve as basis and guidance for development and further improvements to promote scientific competencies in undergraduate medical education in other faculties., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (Copyright © 2019 Drees et al.)

The scientific publication landscape is changing quickly, with an enormous increase in options and models. Articles can be published in a complex variety of journals that differ in their presentation format (online-only or in-print), editorial organizations that maintain them (commercial and/or society-based), editorial handling (academic or professional editors), editorial board composition (academic or professional), payment options to cover editorial costs (open access or pay-to-read), indexation, visibility, branding, and other aspects. Additionally, online submissions of non-revised versions of manuscripts prior to seeking publication in a peer-reviewed journal (a practice known as pre-printing) are a growing trend in biological sciences. In this changing landscape, researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology must re-think their priorities in terms of scientific output dissemination. The evaluation processes and institutional funding for scientific publications should also be revised accordingly. This article presents the results of discussions within the Department of Biochemistry, University of São Paulo, on this subject.

Background: Cancer is a major public health challenge globally. However, little is known about the evolution patterns of cancer research communities and the influencing factors of their research capacity and impact, which is affected not only by the social networks established through research collaboration but also by the knowledge networks in which the research projects are embedded., Methods: The focus of this study was narrowed to a specific topic - 'synthetic lethality' - in cancer research. This field has seen vibrant growth and multidisciplinary collaboration in the past decade. Multi-level collaboration and knowledge networks were established and analysed on the basis of bibliometric data from 'synthetic lethality'-related cancer research papers. Negative binomial regression analysis was further applied to explore how node attributes within these networks, along with other potential factors, affected paper citations, which are widely accepted as proxies for assessing research capacity and impact., Results: Our study revealed that the synthetic lethality-based cancer research field is characterized by a knowledge network with high integration, alongside a collaboration network exhibiting some clustering. We found significant correlations between certain factors and citation counts. Specifically, a leading status within the nation-level international collaboration network and industry involvement were both found to be significantly related to higher citations. In the individual-level collaboration networks, lead authors' degree centrality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with citations, while their structural holes exhibit a positive and significant effect. Within the knowledge network, however, only measures of structural holes have a positive and significant effect on the number of citations., Conclusions: To enhance cancer research capacity and impact, non-leading countries should take measures to enhance their international collaboration status. For early career researchers, increasing the number of collaborators seems to be more effective. University-industry cooperation should also be encouraged, enhancing the integration of human resources, technology, funding, research platforms and medical resources. Insights gained through this study also provide recommendations to researchers or administrators in designing future research directions from a knowledge network perspective. Focusing on unique issues especially interdisciplinary fields will improve output and influence their research work., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The President's Award for best scientific paper is presented to esteemed members at each Southern Thoracic Surgical Association annual meeting to stimulate friendly scientific competition. Between 1964 and 2015, 58 awards were presented for clinical expertise in general thoracic surgery (18), adult cardiac surgery (25), and congenital heart surgery (15). Manuscripts were published by The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, and the average number of subsequent citations in professional medical journals as a measure of scientific importance was 43.7 ± 60.2. A seemingly prosaic addition of a yearly scientific award has had an enormous impact on the scientific community and membership participation., (Copyright © 2018 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research paper recommenders emerged over the last decade to ease finding publications relating to researchers' area of interest. The challenge was not just to provide researchers with very rich publications at any time, any place and in any form but to also offer the right publication to the right researcher in the right way. Several approaches exist in handling paper recommender systems. However, these approaches assumed the availability of the whole contents of the recommending papers to be freely accessible, which is not always true due to factors such as copyright restrictions. This paper presents a collaborative approach for research paper recommender system. By leveraging the advantages of collaborative filtering approach, we utilize the publicly available contextual metadata to infer the hidden associations that exist between research papers in order to personalize recommendations. The novelty of our proposed approach is that it provides personalized recommendations regardless of the research field and regardless of the user's expertise. Using a publicly available dataset, our proposed approach has recorded a significant improvement over other baseline methods in measuring both the overall performance and the ability to return relevant and useful publications at the top of the recommendation list.

Background: Military medicine is a research field that seeks to solve the medical problems that occur in modern war conditions based on public medicine theory., Methods: We explore the main research topics of military health and medical research in the web of science™ core collection (WoSCC) from 2007 to 2016, and the goal of this work is to serve as a reference for orientation and development in military health and medicine. Based on CiteSpace III, a reference co-citation analysis is performed for 7921 papers published in the WoSCC from 2007 to 2016. In addition, a cluster analysis of research topics is performed with a comprehensive analysis of high-yield authors, outstanding research institutions and their cooperative networks., Results: Currently, the research topics in military health and medicine mainly focus on the following seven aspects: mental health diagnoses and interventions, an army study to assess risk and resilience in service members (STARRS), large-scale military action, brain science, veterans, soldier parents and children of wartime, and wound infection. We also observed that the annual publication rate increased with time. Wessely S, Greenberg N, Fear NT, Smith TC, Smith B, Jones N, Ryan MAK, Boyko EJ, Hull L, and Rona RJ were the top 10 authors in military health and medicine research. The top 10 institutes were the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the United States Army, the United States Navy, Kings College London, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Boston University, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Naval Health Research Center, and the VA Boston Healthcare System., Conclusions: We are able to perform a comprehensive analysis of studies in military health and medicine research and summarize the current research climate and the developmental trends in the WoSCC. However, further studies and collaborations are needed worldwide. Overall, our findings provide valuable information and new perspectives and shape future research directions for further research in the area of military health and medicine.

University scientific research ability is an important indicator to express the strength of universities. In this paper, the evaluation of university scientific research ability is investigated based on the output of sci-tech papers. Four university alliances from North America, UK, Australia, and China, are selected as the case study of the university scientific research evaluation. Data coming from Thomson Reuters InCites are collected to support the evaluation. The work has contributed new framework to the issue of university scientific research ability evaluation. At first, we have established a hierarchical structure to show the factors that impact the evaluation of university scientific research ability. Then, a new MCDM method called D-AHP model is used to implement the evaluation and ranking of different university alliances, in which a data-driven approach is proposed to automatically generate the D numbers preference relations. Next, a sensitivity analysis has been given to show the impact of weights of factors and sub-factors on the evaluation result. At last, the results obtained by using different methods are compared and discussed to verify the effectiveness and reasonability of this study, and some suggestions are given to promote China's scientific research ability.

Background: Medical specialty certification exams are high-stakes summative assessments used to determine which doctors have the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes to treat patients independently. Such exams are crucial for patient safety, candidates' career progression and accountability to the public, yet vary significantly among medical specialties and countries. It is therefore of paramount importance that the quality of specialty certification exams is studied in the scientific literature., Methods: In this systematic literature review we used the PICOS framework and searched for papers concerning medical specialty certification exams published in English between 2000 and 2020 in seven databases using a diverse set of search term variations. Papers were screened by two researchers independently and scored regarding their methodological quality and relevance to this review. Finally, they were categorized by country, medical specialty and the following seven Ottawa Criteria of good assessment: validity, reliability, equivalence, feasibility, acceptability, catalytic and educational effect., Results: After removal of duplicates, 2852 papers were screened for inclusion, of which 66 met all relevant criteria. Over 43 different exams and more than 28 different specialties from 18 jurisdictions were studied. Around 77% of all eligible papers were based in English-speaking countries, with 55% of publications centered on just the UK and USA. General Practice was the most frequently studied specialty among certification exams with the UK General Practice exam having been particularly broadly analyzed. Papers received an average of 4.2/6 points on the quality score. Eligible studies analyzed 2.1/7 Ottawa Criteria on average, with the most frequently studied criteria being reliability, validity, and acceptability., Conclusions: The present systematic review shows a growing number of studies analyzing medical specialty certification exams over time, encompassing a wider range of medical specialties, countries, and Ottawa Criteria. Due to their reliance on multiple assessment methods and data-points, aspects of programmatic assessment suggest a promising way forward in the development of medical specialty certification exams which fulfill all seven Ottawa Criteria. Further research is needed to confirm these results, particularly analyses of examinations held outside the Anglosphere as well as studies analyzing entire certification exams or comparing multiple examination methods., (© 2023. BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature.)

This study analyzes funding acknowledgments in scientific papers to investigate relationships between research sponsorship and publication impacts. We identify acknowledgments to research sponsors for nanotechnology papers published in the Web of Science during a one-year sample period. We examine the citations accrued by these papers and the journal impact factors of their publication titles. The results show that publications from grant sponsored research exhibit higher impacts in terms of both journal ranking and citation counts than research that is not grant sponsored. We discuss the method and models used, and the insights provided by this approach as well as it limitations.

In May 2013, the WHO Member States requested the WHO to establish a Global Observatory on Health Research and Development (R&D), as part of a strategic work-plan to promote innovation, build capacity, improve access, and mobilize resources to address diseases that disproportionately affect the world's poorest countries.The rationale for establishing a Global Observatory on Health R&D is to provide a mechanism to monitor and analyse health R&D resource flows, product pipelines, and research outputs, aiming to contribute to the identification of gaps to inform priority-setting for new R&D investments to be operationalized through a new global financing and coordination mechanism for health R&D and utilized by all stakeholders informing health research policy decisions in countries, civil society, and the private sector.As one of the mechanisms to achieve the goals of the Global Observatory on Health R&D, the WHO is launching a Call for Papers to be published as a Thematic Series in Health Research Policy and Systems to contribute state-of-the-art knowledge and innovative approaches to analyse, interpret, and report on health R&D information. Further, to serve as a key resource to inform the future WHO-convened coordination mechanism, which will be utilized to generate evidence-informed priorities for new R&D investments to be financed through a proposed new global financing and coordination mechanism for health R&D.

Chagas disease is a chronic, tropical, parasitic disease, endemic throughout Latin America. The large-scale migration of populations has increased the geographic distribution of the disease and cases have been observed in many other countries around the world. To strengthen the critical mass of knowledge generated in different countries, it is essential to promote cooperative and translational research initiatives. We analyzed authorship of scientific documents on Chagas disease indexed in the Medline database from 1940 to 2009. Bibliometrics was used to analyze the evolution of collaboration patterns. A Social Network Analysis was carried out to identify the main research groups in the area by applying clustering methods. We then analyzed 13,989 papers produced by 21,350 authors. Collaboration among authors dramatically increased over the study period, reaching an average of 6.2 authors per paper in the last five-year period. Applying a threshold of collaboration of five or more papers signed in co-authorship, we identified 148 consolidated research groups made up of 1,750 authors. The Chagas disease network identified constitutes a "small world," characterized by a high degree of clustering and a notably high number of Brazilian researchers.

A Kuhnian approach to research assessment requires us to consider that the important scientific breakthroughs that drive scientific progress are infrequent and that the progress of science does not depend on normal research. Consequently, indicators of research performance based on the total number of papers do not accurately measure scientific progress. Similarly, those universities with the best reputations in terms of scientific progress differ widely from other universities in terms of the scale of investments made in research and in the higher concentrations of outstanding scientists present, but less so in terms of the total number of papers or citations. This study argues that indicators for the 1% high-citation tail of the citation distribution reveal the contribution of universities to the progress of science and provide quantifiable justification for the large investments in research made by elite research universities. In this tail, which follows a power low, the number of the less frequent and highly cited important breakthroughs can be predicted from the frequencies of papers in the upper part of the tail. This study quantifies the false impression of excellence produced by multinational papers, and by other types of papers that do not contribute to the progress of science. Many of these papers are concentrated in and dominate lists of highly cited papers, especially in lower-ranked universities. The h-index obscures the differences between higher- and lower-ranked universities because the proportion of h-core papers in the 1% high-citation tail is not proportional to the value of the h-index.