Aucar John A, Veatch Jessica M, Kiscaden Elizabeth
Department of Surgery, Creighton University, Omaha, NE.
Department of Clinical Research, Creighton University, Omaha, NE.
Surg Open Sci. 2022 Jun 23;10:43-49. doi: 10.1016/j.sopen.2022.06.003. eCollection 2022 Oct.
Acute care surgery (ACS) has grown and evolved since it was conceived in 2005. However, ACS is not recognized in the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Heading thesaurus. This article uses bibliometrics to help define an identity for ACS as a subspecialty of surgery and argue for its addition to the Medical Subject Heading thesaurus.
The terms "Acute Care Surgery," "Wounds and Injuries," "General Surgery," and "Critical Care" were searched with and without the Text Word [TW] modifier using PubMed. The intersections of search sets were identified with the AND conjunction to determine the proportion of ACS literature relevant to each subject term and calculate the penetration of ACS as a keyword term into each subject domain.
A [Medical Subject Heading] limited search on the term "Acute Care Surgery" yielded a predictable return of 0 article. Search of the cohesive term "Acute Care Surgery" [All Fields], restricted to MEDLINE-indexed, English-language articles yielded 2,351 articles published between 2005 and 2020, inclusive. Using ACS as [Text Word] yielded 517 articles. There was a progressive increase in the rate of annual publications. The frequency of subject terms in the ACS [All Fields] set was as follows: Critical Care, 49.70%; General Surgery, 23.26%; and Wounds and Injuries, 20.88%. The frequency of subject terms in the ACS [TW] set was as follows: Critical Care, 32.88%; General Surgery, 43.52%; and Wounds and Injuries, 15.28%. Of this set, 8.32% of articles were not tagged or did not contain a reference to any of these 3 major subjects.
This study demonstrates that ACS as a subject matter is being increasingly expressed in the literature. Adding ACS as a dedicated term into the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Heading thesaurus of controlled vocabulary as a specialty of Surgery would facilitate indexing and retrieval of the literature most relevant to acute care surgeons.
急性护理外科（ACS）自2005年诞生以来不断发展演变。然而，美国国立医学图书馆的医学主题词表中并未收录ACS。本文运用文献计量学方法来帮助界定ACS作为外科学亚专业的身份，并主张将其纳入医学主题词表。
使用PubMed检索“急性护理外科”“创伤与损伤”“普通外科”和“重症监护”等术语，检索时分别带和不带文本词（TW）修饰符。通过“与”连接词确定检索集的交集，以确定与每个主题词相关的ACS文献比例，并计算ACS作为关键词在每个主题领域的渗透率。
对“急性护理外科”一词进行[医学主题词]限制检索，得到的文章数量为0，这在意料之中。检索连贯术语“急性护理外科”[所有字段]，仅限于MEDLINE索引的英文文章，得到2005年至2020年（含）发表的2351篇文章。将ACS用作[文本词]检索得到517篇文章。年发表率呈逐步上升趋势。ACS[所有字段]集中主题词的出现频率如下：重症监护，49.70%；普通外科，23.26%；创伤与损伤，20.88%。ACS[TW]集中主题词的出现频率如下：重症监护，32.88%；普通外科，43.52%；创伤与损伤，15.28%。在这个检索集中，8.32%的文章未被标注或未提及这3个主要主题中的任何一个。
本研究表明，ACS作为一个主题在文献中越来越多地被提及。将ACS作为一个专用术语添加到美国国立医学图书馆的受控词汇医学主题词表中，作为外科学的一个专业，将有助于索引和检索与急性护理外科医生最相关的文献。
