Journal of Pediatric Surgery Article Review: The Disruption Score

The H-index represents the influence or impact of a particular author, with higher values indicating greater impact

Dr. Holcomb's H-index is 51, reflecting extensive publication over his surgical career

Dr. Shaw's H-index is 8, which is typical of a fairly average pediatric surgeon

If future papers only cite a given paper without citing its references, that paper is considered more disruptive; if they cite both the paper and its references, it is less disruptive and more developmental

The disruption score ranges from -1 to +1, with +1 being the most disruptive and -1 being developmental in nature

The disruption score is calculated as a ratio of how much a paper itself is cited versus whether its own references are also cited

In the example calculation, a paper cited 100 times with 90 citations not including the index paper's references (A), 10 citations including both (B), and 20 citations of references alone (C) results in a disruption score of 0.66

A lot of the innovation in pediatric surgery comes from doing a high volume of cases and clinical work, making it difficult to measure academic productivity solely through paper volume

The Gauderer-Ponsky paper describing percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomies ranked number 1 on the top 100 most disruptive papers list

The number 2 ranked paper was a large series on intussusception

The number 3 ranked paper was a large series on fundoplications

A case report on fibrous fusion between the liver and lung, cited only 17 times, ranked number 7 on the list

Different areas within pediatric surgery have varying patterns, with some fields producing more developmental research rather than disruptive research

Trauma surgery had many articles included in the top disruptive papers list due to higher innovation in that field

Citation scores remain the key method of assessing the impact of a particular paper, and the disruption score does not stand up by comparison to conventional citation metrics

If people start making the effort to use the disruption score metric in the next several years, it may become widely adopted

Young authors and academicians could start putting the disruption score on their CVs, which would be interesting to reviewers and could increase visibility of the metric