The Departmental Scholarly Index: A Metric of Research Productivity

While bibliometric ranking systems have been designed to use citations, funding, and alumni productivity, there is a need for a simple metric that objectively evaluates the work of a group or organization. The present study describes a bibliometric tool, the Departmental Scholarly Index (DSI), for this purpose.

Publications from academic plastic surgery programs in qualifying states of the Southeastern Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons released in 2022 were collected via PubMed affiliation search. Publications were recorded in a running list alongside the title and 2022 impact factor of their respective journals. The impact factors were averaged by summing the impact factors and dividing by the number of articles to obtain a raw average. Any publication in a journal with an impact factor greater than five multiples of the raw average was removed as an outlier. The remaining impact factors were then summed and give the final numerical value representing the DSI.

A total of 464 articles published in 139 individual journals were returned from PubMed between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022, for the 22 constituent departments. Calculated Spearman's rank coefficients comparing the DSI ranking with both the Doximity and Persad-Paisley rankings yielded values of 0.66 (P < 0.01) and 0.62 (P < 0.01), respectively. Overall, the DSI rankings largely agree with either the Persad-Paisley or Doximity rankings with notable differences seen in the rankings of Mayo Florida and the University of Alabama. A clear academic ranking of Southeastern Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons programs was generated from these data.

The DSI represents a novel and simple approach to applying objective value to research with the advantage of using data bound to the most recent publication productivity.