Journal of Optometry in PubMed and PubMed Central

Spanish Optometry: Demanding its Place in the International Scientific Publication Scene

PLoS Chairman of the Board Harold Varmus applauds the newly enacted NIH public access policy as a positive step toward ensuring greater access to and better use of the scientific literature.

By analyzing high readership articles from the Chinese Journal of Contemporary Pediatrics (CJCP) in the PubMed Central (PMC) database, this study aims to identify research hotspots and trends in the field of pediatrics. Articles from the CJCP ranked by annual readership in PMC from 2021 to 2023 were collected. Using word frequency analysis and co-word analysis, the thematic characteristics of these articles were explored. The word frequency analysis and co-word analysis revealed four thematic directions that were of significant interest to researchers: (1) current public health or medical events such as COVID-19 and influenza; (2) mental health issues in children and adolescents; (3) pediatric neurological diseases and neurodevelopment; (4) diseases in preterm infants and newborns. This study provides pediatric researchers with a valuable perspective to understand and grasp the development dynamics and future directions in the field of pediatrics.

We start 2002 with a new-look Bulletin. The new design while being visually more attractive gives us more information to the printed page, faster production time, and cost savings we can channel into the work of ensuring the quality and accuracy of the information we print. Another improvement is that with the table of contents now all in one place on the outside back cover, it is easier to see at a glance what each issue is about. With the new design come updated guidelines for contributors (see pp. 85-86). We will now be following closely the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMSBJ, available from http://www.icmje.org/index. html). These are commonly known as the Vancouver Guidelines, after the group of journal editors who met there in 1978 to draw up the first version. The resulting guidelines are now followed by several hundred biomedical journals throughout the world, thereby facilitating the work of authors in preparing their manuscripts. Changes have also been made to the online version of the journal (www.who.int/bulletin). An important development is the arrangement we have made with SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online, www.scielo. br), a project administered by the BIREME centre (www.bireme.br) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Originally conceived to provide free online access to leading Latin American journals, BIREME has now started to run thematic sites. The first of these sites is concerned with public health and the Bulletin is now hosted on it at http://www.scielosp. org/bwho where the full text and figures of Bulletin articles can be consulted in both PDF and HTML formats. SciELO is linked to MEDLINE/PubMed, so anyone searching those databases who retrieves an abstract or title of a Bulletin article can click on the Go to Publisher Site icon to obtain free access to the full text of the relevant article. We will be working further with SciELO to increase the Bulletin's visibility and distribution, and are in discussions with the US National Library of Medicine about including the Bulletin in the PubMed Central database. Another development is a CD-ROM containing the entire text of issues from the beginning of 1999 to the end of 2001. This is in the final stages of production and will be distributed early this year. It will be fully searchable, facilitating rapid retrieval of articles by means of any name or term in the text. In the same spirit we are installing a new manuscript tracking system which, when fully operational, will let authors submit manuscripts online. They will receive a password which will enable them to follow the progress of their manuscripts through the review and production processes. …

The clinical course of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is related to choroidal conditions, and can be determined by the evaluation of the central choroidal thickness (CCT). The aim of this study was to determine the association between the axial length (AL) and choroidal thickness in AMD by measuring these parameters in patients with and without AMD. Seventy eyes of 70 patients (34 men and 36 women; age, 64–88 years; mean age, 77.0 ± 6.5 years) who underwent cataract surgery from February 2015 to March 2020 at the Department of Ophthalmology, Keio University School of Medicine were retrospectively analyzed. The AMD group (29 patients, 29 eyes) included eyes with early AMD, whereas the control group (41 patients, 41 eyes) included those without ocular diseases other than cataract. Optical coherence tomography images were used to measure the CCT and the choroidal vessel diameter (CVD). The IOL Master was used to measure the AL. The results revealed that mean CCT was greater in the AMD group (238.3 ± 108.3 μm) compared with the age-matched control group (187.2 ± 66.8 μm) (p = 0.03). The CCT was negatively correlated with AL in the overall sample (r = -0.42, p = 0.001), the AMD group (r = -0.42, p = 0.02), and the control group (r = -0.42, p = 0.006). Note that all eyes with CCT > 350 μm were included in the AMD group. CCT and CVD were positively correlated in the overall sample (r = 0.76, p < 0.001) as well as in the individual groups (AMD: r = 0.82, p < 0.001; control: r = 0.76, p = 0.004). Given that CCT is an important parameter for predicting the prognosis of subfoveal diseases, routine evaluation of AL may be valuable for a better understanding of the pathogenesis of AMD.

BackgroundComputational methods have been used to find duplicate biomedical publications in MEDLINE. Full text articles are becoming increasingly available, yet the similarities among them have not been systematically studied. Here, we quantitatively investigated the full text similarity of biomedical publications in PubMed Central.Methodology/Principal Findings72,011 full text articles from PubMed Central (PMC) were parsed to generate three different datasets: full texts, sections, and paragraphs. Text similarity comparisons were performed on these datasets using the text similarity algorithm eTBLAST. We measured the frequency of similar text pairs and compared it among different datasets. We found that high abstract similarity can be used to predict high full text similarity with a specificity of 20.1% (95% CI [17.3%, 23.1%]) and sensitivity of 99.999%. similarity and full text similarity have a moderate correlation (Pearson correlation coefficient: −0.423) when the similarity ratio is above 0.4. Among pairs of articles in PMC, method sections are found to be the most repetitive (frequency of similar pairs, methods: 0.029, introduction: 0.0076, results: 0.0043). In contrast, among a set of manually verified duplicate articles, results are the most repetitive sections (frequency of similar pairs, results: 0.94, methods: 0.89, introduction: 0.82). Repetition of introduction and methods sections is more likely to be committed by the same authors (odds of a highly similar pair having at least one shared author, introduction: 2.31, methods: 1.83, results: 1.03). There is also significantly more similarity in pairs of review articles than in pairs containing one review and one nonreview paper (frequency of similar pairs: 0.0167 and 0.0023, respectively).Conclusion/SignificanceWhile quantifying abstract similarity is an effective approach for finding duplicate citations, a comprehensive full text analysis is necessary to uncover all potential duplicate citations in the scientific literature and is helpful when establishing ethical guidelines for scientific publications.

Gastrointestinal motility disorders have been thought to occur due to an imbalance in the interaction of the gut-brain axis, which is regulated by serotonin. This recent discovery can be exploited to find newer therapeutic agents such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for functional gastrointestinal disorders.PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), and Medline databases were used to obtain the data. Meta-analyses, systematic reviews, randomized control trials, and reviews were included and analyzed in the data.Of the 19240 studies, 23 were extracted, and after appropriate quality assessment, they were utilized in this systematic review. They included two meta-analyses, four systematic reviews, two randomized control trials, and 15 review articles. The systematic review focuses on the efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) as compared to other treatment modalities for disorders of gut-brain interaction. It explores various studies analyzing SSRIs for their mechanism of action, their desirable effects for treating irritable bowel syndrome, and their tolerability in patients.SSRIs are effective and safe in treating overall symptoms of gastrointestinal motility disorders, particularly constipation-predominant disorders. They seem to have a better side effect profile than other drugs. This should encourage physicians to prescribe SSRIs early on in the disease.

Safety on a psychological level is progressively renowned as fundamental to mental health issues andpsychological well-being. The concept of feeling safe based on polyvagal theory, proposed by Stephen Porges(2011), has emerged as a comprehensive structure for understanding the autonomic nervous system's role inregulating social behavior, emotional processing, and physiological reactions. This review aims to explore theapplication of polyvagal theory in the understanding of psychiatric disorders, with a focus on how autonomicnervous system dysregulation influences emotional and behavioral manifestations, thereby contributing to thedevelopment of effective therapeutic interventions aimed at enhancing feelings of safety and well-being in thepatients suffering from psychiatric disorders. The systematic literature review technique based on the PRISMAmodel was used for this purpose. Sources were obtained through PubMed, APA PsycArticles, PLOS, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and PubMed Central (PMC) database, using different keywords as the primary descriptorand limiting the sources to English-language articles published in the last ten years from 2013 to 2023. Thereview synthesized findings from various studies investigating the association between the polyvagal theoryand psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders, depression, psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stressdisorder (PTSD), borderline personality disorder, and childhood disorders including conduct disorder, attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results exhibit that individualsuffering from these psychiatric disorders frequently displayed autonomic nervous system dysregulation, asproposed by the polyvagal theory, which seems to be a shared feature in many psychiatric disorders. Thesystematic review highlighted the significance of physiological aspects of mental health and indicates thatinterventions focusing on autonomic regulation may hold the potential to assuage the basic symptoms relevantto psychiatric disorders. Additional research work is defensible to clarify the primary mechanisms and improvethe implication of interventions which are based on polyvagal theory for better clinical outcomes.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a method that allows us to automatically index and retrieve information from a set of objects by reducing the term-by-document matrix using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique. However, LSA has a high computational cost for analyzing large amounts of information. The goals of this work are (i) to improve the execution time of semantic space construction, dimensionality reduction, and information retrieval stages of LSA based on heterogeneous systems and (ii) to evaluate the accuracy and recall of the information retrieval stage. We present a heterogeneous Latent Semantic Analysis (hLSA) system, which has been developed using General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) architecture, which can solve large numeric problems faster through the thousands of concurrent threads on multiple CUDA cores of GPUs and multi-CPU architecture, which can solve large text problems faster through a multiprocessing environment. We execute the hLSA system with documents from the PubMed Central (PMC) database. The results of the experiments show that the acceleration reached by the hLSA system for large matrices with one hundred and fifty thousand million values is around eight times faster than the standard LSA version with an accuracy of 88% and a recall of 100%.

Background: Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) may be a potential biomarker of inflammation in patients with stroke. Elevated RDW is associated with higher incidence of stroke, unfavorable functional outcome, and increased mortality, although results are inconsistent in the reported literature. This study aims to evaluate the predictive power of RDW regarding stroke occurrence and outcome.Methods: A thorough literature search was conducted utilizing the PubMed Central (PMC) and EMBASE databases to identify studies up to May 2019. Data from these studies were pooled, and combined odds ratios/risk ratios (ORs/RRs) were estimated for the risk of stroke, functional outcome, and mortality. A subgroup analysis was also performed to explore heterogeneity in terms of population status, demographic factors (age, gender distribution, and country), and vascular risk factors (hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and current smoking).Results: A total of 31 studies with 3,487,896 patients were included in the analysis. Elevated RDW was found to be a risk factor in ischemic stroke (OR/RR 1.528; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.372–1.703), whereas combined OR in subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) was not statistically significant (OR/RR 1.835; 95% CI = 0.888–3.792). Elevated RDW posed increased risk in populations with conventionally higher risk of stroke, such as atrial fibrillation (AF) (OR/RR 1.292; 95% CI = 1.107–1.508) and diabetes mellitus (OR/RR 2.101; 95% CI = 1.488–2.968), and in community cohorts (OR/RR 1.245; 95% CI = 1.216–1.275). In addition, higher RDW was associated with unfavorable functional outcome, either at discharge (OR/RR 1.220; 95% CI = 1.070–1.39) or at 90 days (OR/RR 1.277; 95% CI = 1.155–1.413). Higher mortality was found in patients with increased RDW (OR/RR 1.278; 95% CI = 1.221–1.337), independent of demographic factors (age, gender distribution, and country).Conclusions: Baseline RDW should be integrated into clinical practice as a predictor of ischemic stroke occurrence and outcome. Future studies should also explore the dynamic change of RDW in post-stroke patients to evaluate the clinical significance of RDW and its impact on the inflammatory state of ischemic stroke.

Background:Pemphigus vulgaris (PV) is a rare autoimmune blistering disease characterized by intraepithelial and mucocutaneous blister formation and erosion. Numerous articles related to PV have been published. However, which articles have a tremendous influence is still unknown, and factors affecting article citation numbers remain unclear. We aimed to visualize the prominent entities using the top 100 most-cited articles on the topic of PV (T100PV), and investigate whether medical subject headings (i.e., MeSH terms) can be used to predict article citations.Methods:By searching the PubMed Central (PMC) database, the T100PV abstracts since 2011 were downloaded. Citation analysis was performed to compare the dominant entities in article topics, authors, and research institutes using social network analysis (SNA) and Kano diagrams. We examined the MeSH prediction power against article citations using correlation coefficients (CCs).Results:The most cited article (125 times) was authored by Ellebrecht from the University of Pennsylvania in the US. The most productive countries were Germany (28%) and the US (25%). Most articles were published in J Invest Dermatol (16%) and Br J Dermatol (10%). Kasperkiewicz (Germany) and the Normandie University (France) were the most cited authors and research institutes, respectively. The most frequently occurred MeSH terms were administration and dosage, immunology, and metabolism. MeSH terms were evident in the prediction power on the number of article citations (F = 19.77; P < .001).Conclusion:A breakthrough was achieved by developing dashboards to display the T100PV. MeSH terms can be used to predict the T100PV citations. These T100PV visualizations can be applied in future studies.

A Comparison of Assertive Community Treatment and Intensive Case Management for Patients in Rural Areas

The Launch of PRS GO

Developing Therapies for Age-related Macular Degeneration: The Art and Science of Problem-solving: The 2018 Charles L. Schepens, MD, Lecture

Future directions for research and education