The 100 Most Cited Papers Concerning the Insular Cortex of the Brain: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background: The insula is one of the most researched brain regions with many highly cited papers. However, unlike the literature of other fields, there is currently no study that has identified the 100 most cited papers within the literature of the insula. The aim of the current study was to fill in the knowledge gap by determining which publications concerning the insula have been cited most often, who contributed to them, and what topics they were dealing with.Methods: The Web of Science online database was searched to identify the 100 most cited publications mentioning the insular cortex in their titles, abstracts or keywords. To systematically exclude irrelevant publications, the search strategy was finalized as: TS = (insula OR insular OR “island of Reil”) NOT TS = (“insular biogeography” OR “insular mammal*” OR “*insular lymphatic*”) NOT WC = (“Geochemistry and Geophysics” OR “Ecology”). The identified publications were sorted in descending order of citation count. The 100 most cited publications concerning the insula of the brain were identified and their bibliometric data was extracted and assessed. The VOSviewer software was used with default parameters to generate a bubble map that analyzes and visualizes the words/phrases used in the titles and abstracts of the publications.Results: There were 67 articles on experiments/lab studies and 33 meta-analyses/reviews but no opinion or methods paper. They had an average of 943.4 citations (or 62.9 citations per year), 93.5 references and 13.4 pages. There were 35 papers published in open access. USA was the major contributing country. The most top-ranked publications were concerning emotion, salience and pain.Conclusion: Two-thirds of the publications concerned the normal brain function/mechanism (n = 67), whereas 20 publications concerned disease/therapeutic intervention and another 13 concerned normal anatomy. For the 67 original articles, 57 used human subjects whereas 10 used animal models. MRI was the commonest modality (n = 37), followed by PET (n = 16). Nine articles investigated by histology, two by multiple modalities and three by other modality

Readability of the 100 Most-Cited Neuroimaging Papers Assessed by Common Readability Formulae

Background: From time to time, neuroimaging research findings receive press coverage and attention by the general public. Scientific articles therefore should be written in a readable manner to facilitate knowledge translation and dissemination. However, no published readability report on neuroimaging articles like those published in education, medical and marketing journals is available. As a start, this study therefore aimed to evaluate the readability of the most-cited neuroimaging articles.Methods: The 100 most-cited articles in neuroimaging identified in a recent study by Kim et al. (2016) were evaluated. Headings, mathematical equations, tables, figures, footnotes, appendices, and reference lists were trimmed from the articles. The rest was processed for number of characters, words and sentences. Five readability indices that indicate the school grade appropriate for that reading difficulty (Automated Readability Index, Coleman-Liau Index, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog index and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook index) were computed. An average reading grade level (AGL) was calculated by taking the mean of these five indices. The Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) score was also computed. The readability of the trimmed abstracts and full texts was evaluated against number of authors, country of corresponding author, total citation count, normalized citation count, article type, publication year, impact factor of the year published and type of journal.Results: Mean AGL ± standard deviation (SD) of the trimmed abstracts and full texts were 17.15 ± 2.81 (college graduate level) and 14.22 ± 1.66 (college level) respectively. Mean FRE score ± SD of the abstracts and full texts were 15.70 ± 14.11 (college graduate level) and 32.11 ± 8.56 (college level) respectively. Both items indicated that the full texts were significantly more readable than the abstracts (p < 0.001). Abstract readability was not associated with any factors under investigation. ANCOVAs showed that review/meta-analysis (mean AGL ± SD: 16.0 ± 1.4) and higher impact factor significantly associated with lower readability of the trimmed full texts surveyed.Conclusion: Concerning the 100 most-cited articles in neuroimaging, the full text appears to be more readable than the abstracts. Experimental articles and methodology papers were more readable than reviews/meta-analyses. Articles published in journals with higher impact factors were less readable

Phytol: A review of biomedical activities

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (Auguist 2018) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyPhytol (PYT) is a diterpene member of the long-chain unsaturated acyclic alcohols. PYT and some of its derivatives, including phytanic acid (PA), exert a wide range of biological effects. PYT is a valuable essential oil (EO) used as a fragrance and a potential candidate for a broad range of applications in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry. There is ample evidence that PA may play a crucial role in the development of pathophysiological states. Focusing on PYT and some of its most relevant derivatives, here we present a systematic review of reported biological activities, along with their underlying mechanism of action. Recent investigations with PYT demonstrated anxiolytic, metabolism-modulating, cytotoxic, antioxidant, autophagy- and apoptosis-inducing, antinociceptive, anti-inflammatory, immune-modulating, and antimicrobial effects. PPARs- and NF-κB-mediated activities are also discussed as mechanisms responsible for some of the bioactivities of PYT. The overall goal of this review is to discuss recent findings pertaining to PYT biological activities and its possible applications

Erratum to: Methods for evaluating medical tests and biomarkers

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s41512-016-0001-y.]

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Evidence synthesis to inform model-based cost-effectiveness evaluations of diagnostic tests: a methodological systematic review of health technology assessments

Background: Evaluations of diagnostic tests are challenging because of the indirect nature of their impact on patient outcomes. Model-based health economic evaluations of tests allow different types of evidence from various sources to be incorporated and enable cost-effectiveness estimates to be made beyond the duration of available study data. To parameterize a health-economic model fully, all the ways a test impacts on patient health must be quantified, including but not limited to diagnostic test accuracy. Methods: We assessed all UK NIHR HTA reports published May 2009-July 2015. Reports were included if they evaluated a diagnostic test, included a model-based health economic evaluation and included a systematic review and meta-analysis of test accuracy. From each eligible report we extracted information on the following topics: 1) what evidence aside from test accuracy was searched for and synthesised, 2) which methods were used to synthesise test accuracy evidence and how did the results inform the economic model, 3) how/whether threshold effects were explored, 4) how the potential dependency between multiple tests in a pathway was accounted for, and 5) for evaluations of tests targeted at the primary care setting, how evidence from differing healthcare settings was incorporated. Results: The bivariate or HSROC model was implemented in 20/22 reports that met all inclusion criteria. Test accuracy data for health economic modelling was obtained from meta-analyses completely in four reports, partially in fourteen reports and not at all in four reports. Only 2/7 reports that used a quantitative test gave clear threshold recommendations. All 22 reports explored the effect of uncertainty in accuracy parameters but most of those that used multiple tests did not allow for dependence between test results. 7/22 tests were potentially suitable for primary care but the majority found limited evidence on test accuracy in primary care settings. Conclusions: The uptake of appropriate meta-analysis methods for synthesising evidence on diagnostic test accuracy in UK NIHR HTAs has improved in recent years. Future research should focus on other evidence requirements for cost-effectiveness assessment, threshold effects for quantitative tests and the impact of multiple diagnostic tests

Erratum to: Methods for evaluating medical tests and biomarkers

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s41512-016-0001-y.]

Do Neuroscience Journals Accept Replications? A Survey of Literature

Background: Recent reports in neuroscience, especially those concerning brain-injury and neuroimaging, have revealed low reproducibility of results within the field and urged for more replication studies. However, it is unclear if the neuroscience journals welcome or discourage the submission of reports on replication studies. Therefore, the current study assessed the explicit position of neuroscience journals on replications.Methods: A list of active neuroscience journals publishing in English was compiled from Scopus database. These journal websites were accessed to read their aims and scope and instructions to authors, and to assess if they: (1) explicitly stated that they accept replications; (2) did not state their position on replications; (3) implicitly discouraged replications by emphasizing on the novelty of the manuscripts; or (4) explicitly stated that they reject replications. For journals that explicitly stated they accept or reject replications, their subcategory within neuroscience and their 5-year impact factor were recorded. The distribution of neuroscience replication studies published was also recorded by searching and extracting data from Scopus.Results: Of the 465 journals reviewed, 28 (6.0%) explicitly stated that they accept replications, 394 (84.7%) did not state their position on replications, 40 (8.6%) implicitly discouraged replications by emphasizing on the novelty of the manuscripts, and 3 (0.6%) explicitly stated that they reject replications. For the 28 journals that explicitly welcomed replications, three (10.7%) stated their position in the aims and scope, whereas 25 (89.3%) stated in within the detailed instructions to authors. The five-year impact factor (2015) of these journals ranged from 1.655 to 10.799, and nine of them (32.1%) did not receive a 5-year or annual impact factor in 2015. There was no significant difference in the proportions of journals explicitly welcomed replications (journals with vs. without impact factors, or high vs. low impact factors). All sub-categories of neuroscience had at least a journal that welcomed replications.Discussion: The neuroscience journals that welcomed replications and published replications were reported. These pieces of information may provide descriptive information on the current journal practices regarding replication so the evidence-based recommendations to journal publishers can be made

An Updated Survey on Statistical Thresholding and Sample Size of fMRI Studies

Background: Since the early 2010s, the neuroimaging field has paid more attention to the issue of false positives. Several journals have issued guidelines regarding statistical thresholds. Three papers have reported the statistical analysis of the thresholds used in fMRI literature, but they were published at least 3 years ago and surveyed papers published during 2007–2012. This study revisited this topic to evaluate the changes in this field.Methods: The PubMed database was searched to identify the task-based (not resting-state) fMRI papers published in 2017 and record their sample sizes, inferential methods (e.g., voxelwise or clusterwise), theoretical methods (e.g., parametric or non-parametric), significance level, cluster-defining primary threshold (CDT), volume of analysis (whole brain or region of interest) and software used.Results: The majority (95.6%) of the 388 analyzed articles reported statistics corrected for multiple comparisons. A large proportion (69.6%) of the 388 articles reported main results by clusterwise inference. The analyzed articles mostly used software Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM), Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI), or FMRIB Software Library (FSL) to conduct statistical analysis. There were 70.9%, 37.6%, and 23.1% of SPM, AFNI, and FSL studies, respectively, that used a CDT of p ≤ 0.001. The statistical sample size across the articles ranged between 7 and 1,299 with a median of 33. Sample size did not significantly correlate with the level of statistical threshold.Conclusion: There were still around 53% (142/270) studies using clusterwise inference that chose a more liberal CDT than p = 0.001 (n = 121) or did not report their CDT (n = 21), down from around 61% reported by Woo et al. (2014). For FSL studies, it seemed that the CDT practice had no improvement since the survey by Woo et al. (2014). A few studies chose unconventional CDT such as p = 0.0125 or 0.004. Such practice might create an impression that the threshold alterations were attempted to show “desired” clusters. The median sample size used in the analyzed articles was similar to those reported in previous surveys. In conclusion, there seemed to be no change in the statistical practice compared to the early 2010s

Präimplantologisch-radiologische Diagnostik mittels DVT im posterioren Oberkiefer unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Sinus maxillaris

Die Kieferhöhle ist ein symmetrisch angelegter, pyramidenförmiger Hohlraum des Gesichtsschädels, der regelmäßig bei der Anfertigung zahnärztlicher Röntgenaufnahmen im Oberkiefer abgebildet wird. Für zahnärztliche Indikationen hat sich die dreidimensionale Darstellung der Kieferhöhle mittels digitaler Volumentomografie (DVT) besonders vor einer geplanten Implantattherapie mit/ ohne Sinusbodenelevation etabliert. Hier ist die Darstellung des Ostium naturale auf dem entspre- chenden FOV (field of view) wünschenswert, aber nicht zwingend. Kenntnisse über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen in der zahnärztlichen Diagnostik helfen dem Zahnarzt zielgerichtete Entscheidungen zu treffen und unnötige bildgebende Maßnahmen zu vermeiden. Kieferhöhlenveränderungen sind häufig und weisen ein breites Spektrum auf, das von einer harmlosen anatomischen Variante bis zu einer bösartigen Neoplasie reicht. Während erstere keine weitere Behandlung erfordert, müssen andere regelmäßig nachkontrolliert oder auch baldmöglichst chirurgisch therapiert werden. Das oft klinisch stumme Wachstum raumfordernder Prozesse in der Kieferhöhle unterstreicht die Bedeutung einer initialen, umfassenden klinischen und radiologischen Befundung, speziell auch im Hinblick auf zahnärztlich-chirurgische Eingriffe in der Kieferhöhle. Weiterführende diagnostische Maßnahmen und radiologische Verfahren sollten dem Spezialisten vorbehalten sein