Recent Trends in Publications of US and European Directors in Vascular Surgery

We hypothesized that there may be significant differences between academic productivity of the vascular training programs in the United States (US) and Europe. In an effort to explore this theory, we reviewed the number of vascular publications listed in PubMed from 2010 to 2015 for US and European directors in vascular surgery.

The list of program directors from the Association of Program Directors in Vascular Surgery (APDVS) and the European Union of Medical Specialists (EUMS) were queried for the names of the directors of vascular surgical training programs at the end of 2015. PubMed listed 5,474 citations published from 2010 to 2015. Three thousand five hundred sixty-one were from Europe while 1,912 were from the US. UK and German programs did not list their directors' names in the EUMS website and were thus not included in the European data.

The average number of citations in PubMed per program director was 2.36 per year. In Europe, each of the 273 program directors averaged 2.17 publications per year, whereas each of the 114 US program directors averaged 2.80 publications per year (P = 0.37). Journal of Vascular Surgery (JVS) publications made up 24.0% (12.7% in Europe and 45.0% in the US). In the US, the top third produced 69% of the publications and 77% of the JVS publications, whereas in Europe, the top third produced 87% of the publications and 98% of the JVS publications. In the US, 5 program directors (4.4%) had no publications and 21 (18.4%) had no JVS publications. In Europe, 82 program directors (30.0%) had no publications, whereas 180 (65.9%) had no JVS publications. Abstracts were categorized by topic for comparison.

In both Europe and the US, the top third produced more than two-thirds of the publications, with the disparity being even more pronounced in Europe where the top third produced almost 90% of the total publications. Comparing the topics of the publications from Europe and the US, it was found that the US program directors published a great deal more on Endovenous Lower Extremity, Open Lower Extremity, Education, thoracic endovascular aortic repair, Open Carotid, and Endo Venous, whereas their European counterparts published more in the areas of Vascular Medicine, Replies, and Not Vascular.