BACKGROUND
A new bibliometric index called the disruption score was recently proposed to identify innovative and paradigm-changing publications.
OBJECTIVE
The goal was to apply the disruption score to the colorectal surgery literature to provide the community with a repository of important research papers.
DESIGN
A bibliometric analysis.
SETTINGS
The 100 most disruptive and developmental publications in Diseases of the Colon and Rectum, Colorectal Disease, International Journal of Colorectal Disease, and Techniques in Coloproctology were identified from a validated dataset of disruption scores and linked with the iCite NIH tool to obtain citation counts.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Disruption score and citation count.
RESULTS
We identified 12,127 articles published in Diseases of the Colon and Rectum (n=8,109), International Journal of Colorectal Disease (n=1,912), Colorectal Disease (n=1,751), and Techniques in Coloproctology (n=355) between 1954-2014. Diseases of the Colon and Rectum had the most papers in the top 100 most disruptive and developmental lists. The disruptive papers were in the top 1% of the disruption score distribution in PubMed and were cited between 1 and 671 times. Being highly cited was weakly correlated with high disruption scores (r=0.09). Developmental papers had disruption scores that were more strongly correlated with citation count (r=0.18).
LIMITATIONS
Subject to limitations of bibliometric indices, which change over time.
DISCUSSION
The disruption score identified insightful and paradigm-changing studies in colorectal surgery. Interestingly, they include a wide range of topics and consistently identified editorials and case reports/case series as important research. This bibliometric analysis provides colorectal surgeons with a unique archive of research that can often be overlooked, but that may have scholarly significance. See Video Abstract at http://links.lww.com/DCR/B639 .