Schwarzer Michael, Alscher Leonhard, Doenst Torsten
Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University Hospital Jena, Jena, Germany.
Thorac Cardiovasc Surg. 2019 Sep;67(6):488-493. doi: 10.1055/s-0038-1661004. Epub 2018 Jun 28.
Scientific publications are important for the advancement in medicine. Surgical disciplines including cardiac surgery are frequently considered not scientifically leading. However, a specific comparison between surgical and nonsurgical disciplines has not yet been performed. We thus compared scientific output of German departments of cardiac surgery with nonsurgical cardiology departments and surgical departments not addressing the heart (general surgery) of 34 universities in Germany.
For each university, the personnel working at the different departments were identified on the internet homepage in 2014. We searched for publications of these persons in 2011 to 2013 on PubMed, identified author position, coauthors, and type of article, as well as journal impact factor (JIF).
There were 931 academic persons in cardiac surgery, 1,486 in general surgery, and 1,814 in cardiology with 12,096 publications related to these persons on PubMed. Cardiology published most manuscripts, including manuscripts from research conducted (first author), initiated (senior author), or both. Cardiac surgery had the least publications and had fewer authors from other departments or institutions. The average JIF was higher in cardiology compared with the two surgical disciplines. However, relating the number of publications to the number of employees in the departments, the differences were no longer apparent.
We conclude that the number of publications in German universities appears to be a function of the number of academic personnel and not of the discipline. The lower JIFs in surgery may be due to the smaller surgical fields and/or due to less high impact interdisciplinary/interinstitutional publications in surgery.
科学出版物对医学进步至关重要。包括心脏外科在内的外科学科通常被认为在科学领域不占主导地位。然而，尚未对外科和非外科领域进行具体比较。因此，我们比较了德国34所大学的心脏外科科室与非外科心脏病学科室以及不涉及心脏的外科科室（普通外科）的科研产出。
2014年，通过各大学的互联网主页确定在不同科室工作的人员。我们在PubMed上搜索了这些人员在2011年至2013年期间的出版物，确定了作者职位、共同作者、文章类型以及期刊影响因子（JIF）。
心脏外科有931名学术人员，普通外科有1486名，心脏病学有1814名，PubMed上有12096篇与这些人员相关的出版物。心脏病学发表的手稿最多，包括作为研究（第一作者）、发起（资深作者）或两者兼具发表的手稿。心脏外科的出版物最少，来自其他科室或机构的作者也较少。与两个外科学科相比，心脏病学的平均JIF更高。然而，将出版物数量与科室员工数量相关联后，差异不再明显。
我们得出结论，德国大学的出版物数量似乎是学术人员数量的函数，而非学科的函数。外科较低的JIF可能是由于外科领域较小和/或外科领域中高影响力的跨学科/机构间出版物较少。
