Editorial

Editor's Response to Letters about Rappaport et al.

Introduction: In recent years, the use of portfolios as learning and assessment tools has become more widespread across the range of health professions. Whilst a growing body of literature has accompanied these trends, there is no clear collated summary of the evidence for the educational effects of the use of portfolios in undergraduate education. This systematic review is the result of our work to provide such a summary.Methods: We developed a protocol based on the recommendations of the Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) collaboration. Citations retrieved by electronic searches of 10 databases were assessed against pre-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria by two independent reviewers and full texts of potentially relevant articles were obtained. Studies were identified for inclusion in the review by examination of full text articles by two independent reviewers. At all stages, discrepancies were resolved by consensus. Data relating to characteristics of the student population, intervention, outcome...

Objective To investigate the academic level and influence of the Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery from the point of articles published and the authors.Methods The articles and authors of Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery from 2002 to 2012 were retrieved from the Wanfang database and the China National Knowledge Internet database.The full texts were browsed and saved,and then the data were input to Excel for bibliometric analysis.Results There were 1917 articles were published in the Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery during the past 11 years,and the average number of articles per issue was 29.05.The rate of articles with funded projects was 30.62％,and the citation rate was 58.52％.Authors were from 32 provinces,municipalites and Hong Kong.The numbers of articles contributed by authors from Chongqing,Beijing and Shanghai ranked top 3,which were 446(23.27％),240(12.52％) and 203(10.59％),and followed by authors from Sichuan,Jiangshu and Guandong.The number of articles from affiliated hospitals of Medical Schools was 1382 (72.09％).The cooperation rate was 4.37,and the coauthor rate was 90.03％.Conclusions Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery is an academic journal with high quality and strong influence.The distribution of authors of the Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery is wide,and the cooperative rate of authors is high,while the distribution of authors is disproportionate. Key words: Bibliometrics ; Periodicals ; Digestive surgery ; Article analysis ; Author analysis

Closing the gender gap: building a successful career and leadership in research as a female gastroenterologist

Effects of Helicobacter pylori and Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs on Peptic Ulcer Disease: A Systematic Review

BiotecVisions 2012, February

INTRODUCTION: Nonrelaxing pelvic floor dysfunction (PFD) is a condition characterized by tension of the pelvic floor musculature, often resulting in pelvic pain. The objective of this study was to review patient-reported pain outcomes following treatment of nonrelaxing pelvic floor dysfunction to identify gaps in current evidence. METHODS: A systematic review of the following databases from inception to July 2020 was performed: Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Scopus. Two authors reviewed titles and abstracts for relevance, and full articles were obtained and evaluated for inclusion. Studies were included if they assess interventions for nonrelaxing PFD characterized by pelvic pain. The third author was consulted in instances of disagreement. RESULTS: Of the 1,184 abstracts identified and reviewed, 36 full text articles were reviewed. Treatments for nonrelaxing PFD included biofeedback, botulinum toxin injections, electrical stimulation, intravaginal diazepam, massage, osteopathy, psychiatric interview, physical therapy, sacral nerve stimulation, trigger point injection, and combined therapies. Nineteen studies assessed the effectiveness of treatment based on patient reported pain outcomes. All studies demonstrated an improvement in pelvic pain. Several limitations were identified including varied pre-treatment diagnostic evaluation, small sample size, retrospective and single arm design, heterogeneity in treatment administration within and between studies, lack of standardized pain assessments, and limited long term outcome data. CONCLUSION: Nonrelaxing PFD is a debilitating condition. There is a paucity of high-quality clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of pelvic floor muscle dysfunction treatments. Although preliminary studies support multi-modal treatment options, robust trials assessing patient-centered outcomes are necessary.

PubTator Central (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator/) is a web service for viewing and retrieving bioconcept annotations in full text biomedical articles. PubTator Central (PTC) provides automated annotations from state-of-the-art text mining systems for genes/proteins, genetic variants, diseases, chemicals, species and cell lines, all available for immediate download. PTC annotates PubMed (29 million abstracts) and the PMC Text Mining subset (3 million full text articles). The new PTC web interface allows users to build full text document collections and visualize concept annotations in each document. Annotations are downloadable in multiple formats (XML, JSON and tab delimited) via the online interface, a RESTful web service and bulk FTP. Improved concept identification systems and a new disambiguation module based on deep learning increase annotation accuracy, and the new server-side architecture is significantly faster. PTC is synchronized with PubMed and PubMed Central, with new articles added daily. The original PubTator service has served annotated abstracts for ∼300 million requests, enabling third-party research in use cases such as biocuration support, gene prioritization, genetic disease analysis, and literature-based knowledge discovery. We demonstrate the full text results in PTC significantly increase biomedical concept coverage and anticipate this expansion will both enhance existing downstream applications and enable new use cases.

Editorial Policy

Letter to the Editor re: Gender Differences in Authorship in Urology: A Five-year Review of Publications in Five High-impact Journals

BackgroundThe charitable food assistance system has an influential role in the larger effort to curtail the problem of food insecurity globally. They often play a crucial role in meeting the food security needs of the poor, particularly resource-limited settings where food security is a challenge. The aim of our study is to compare evidence on the safety and general hygiene of charitable food assistance system in Africa and the rest of the world.MethodsThis study will be conducted through a systematic scoping review. We will search for literature from the following electronic databases: African Index Medicus, PubMed, Google Scholar, EBSCOhost (MEDLINE with full text, Academic Search Complete, MEDLINE) and open access for unpublished theses and dissertations. Articles will also be searched through the ‘Cited by’ search as well as citations included in the reference lists of included articles. Websites, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Departments of Health websites, will be searched for policies and guidelines for food charity practice. Studies will be identified by searching literature published in any language between 1967 and 2018. Then, following title screening, eligible studies will be exported to EndNote library where duplicates will be removed before the parallel screening of abstracts and full articles by two independent reviewers. Screening will be guided by the study eligibility criteria. Data from the included studies will be extracted, and the emerging themes will be analysed. The relationship of the emerging themes to the research question will be critically examined. The quality of the included studies will be determined by the use of Mixed Method Appraisal Tool (MMAT)—version 2011.The search results will be presented through the use of the adapted PRISMA-P chart.DiscussionWe hope to find relevant studies that highlight evidence of charitable organisations’ food safety and general hygiene practices, in order to effectively compare their performance to those of formal and informal food establishments. Findings of this study will be disseminated electronically, in print and through peer presentation, conferences and congresses on synergies between efforts to reduce food loss and waste and those practices of public health concern.

BackgroundIntimate partner violence among young women continues to be a worldwide concern. Globally, a considerable number of studies reported numerous factors that influence intimate partner violence among the young. The proposed scoping review aims to map available evidence of socio-cultural factors influencing intimate partner violence among young women.MethodsWe will conduct a scoping review to explore, describe and map literature on socio-cultural factors influencing intimate partner violence among young women. The search strategy for this scoping review study will involve electronic databases including PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Science Direct, EBSCOHost (PubMed, CINAHL with Full Text, MEDLINE), Google Scholar, BioMed Central and World Health Organization library. Articles will also be searched through the “Cited by” search as well as citations included in the reference lists of included articles. Keyword searches will be used, and two independent reviewers will be screening titles, abstracts and full articles; where there are disputes between the two reviewers, a third reviewer will intervene. Thematic analysis will be employed to present the narrative account of the review.DiscussionUnderstanding socio-cultural factors influencing intimate partner violence among young women is critical. This will enable researchers to map existing literature, map research gaps and guide future research.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO (CRD42018116463)

Electrocardiographic features of patients with COVID-19: One year of unexpected manifestations

SARS-CoV-2's origin should be investigated worldwide for pandemic prevention

Research problem: This study explores the use of bibliometric indicators to objectively evaluate IEEE scientific journals from two different perspectives: (1) journal impact and diffusion and (2) the academic reputation of journal authors. Research questions: (1) Which journals are better at selecting articles with high scientific impact (measured by average citations per article), and publishing authors with strong reputations (measured by h-indices)? (2) Does the impact of journal articles correlate positively with the reputations of their authors? and (3) Can bibliometric indicators provide a simple way for journal editors to monitor journal performance in a manner complementary to traditional ISI impact factor (IF)? Literature review: This paper reviews literature on citation analysis, a bibliometric method of measuring impact based on the number of times a work is cited, and explains such bibliometric indicators as CPP, Hirsch index, and IF which measure the impact of a journal, and introduces a new indicator called h-spectrum to objectively measure the reputation of a journal's author group. Methodology: This quantitative study performed citation analysis on 250,000 authors in 110 IEEE journals using citation statistics from the Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus databases to construct the h-spectrum indicator. The authors used automated filtering techniques to exclude questionable author data. Results and conclusions: The first phase of analysis indicated significant differences among IEEE publications in journal impact, and found that the h-index and CPP were suitable for evaluating journals except in their most recent five years where annual rankings are proposed instead. The second phase of analysis found that h-spectra distributions of author reputation differ among journals in a single year, and are generally stable for a single journal over five years. Maps were constructed to locate journals graphically based on the complementary indicators of impact and reputation, and to show changes in impact and reputation over time. The maps indicated that journals with high impact tend to have authors with high reputations but the opposite is not necessarily true. Suggestions were made to explain different combinations of high and low impact and reputation for journals. The use of maps complements IF and provides a simple tool to monitor journal reputation at the time of most recent publication. The study is limited by assumptions about the value of citations, the reliability of search engine statistics, and the homogeneity of IEEE journal citation practices, as well as the failure to account for coauthors, article age, and authors who publish multiple times per year in the same journal. Future research could examine non-IEEE journals and normalize subfields within IEEE journals to avoid favoring fields that use more citations.