The disruption score: a novel bibliometric analysis of obstetrics and gynecology

The disruption score is a bibliometric tool which measures the degree to which publications develop existing ideas of a given medical specialty or shift the direction toward new horizons via disruptive processes. We used disruption score to rank published works in Obstetrics and Gynecology (OBGYN).

OBGYN journal titles indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed Central were identified and used to pull article abstracts from PubMed published from 1900 to 2021. A disruption score (-1 to +1) was assigned based on each publication's citation patterns. Articles with a negative score were considered developmental works, which often build upon existing ideas. Positive scoring articles were considered disruptive, often introducing innovative ideas. The top 100 highest scoring articles were identified across 3 categories: top cited, top disruption score, top developmental score.

Our search strategy identified 381,677 works in the field of OBGYN. Top papers were drawn most often from American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (53%) and British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (16%). By topic, top cited papers were commonly gynecologically-focused (65% GYN vs 33% OB), as compared to disruptive papers (40% GYN vs 58% OB) and development papers (34% GYN vs 65% OB) (p < 0.005). By study design, top cited papers were observational (40%) and review (31%). Top developmental papers were case report/case series (54%) and observational (17%). Top disruptive papers were observational (37%) and case reports/case series (29%).

The disruption score highlighted an entirely different set of OBGYN articles when compared to citation count alone. The disruption score can be utilized to provide a novel analysis of the rich literary history of OBGYN.