Organic Certification is Not Enough: The Case of the Methoxydecane Frankincense.

Frankincense, the oleo-gum-resin of Boswellia trees, has been an important religious and medicinal element for thousands of years, and today is used extensively for essential oils. One of the most popular frankincense species is Boswellia sacra Flueck. (syn. Boswellia carteri Birdw.) from Somalia and Somaliland. Recent increases in demand have led to many areas being overharvested, emphasizing the need for incentives and monitoring for sustainable harvesting, such as certification schemes. Concurrently, a new chemical component, called methoxydecane, has emerged in oils claimed to be B. carteri, suggesting the possibility of a chemical marker of overharvesting or other stress that could aid in monitoring. To find the source of this new chemical component, we sampled resin directly from trees in areas producing the new methoxydecane chemotype. This revealed that methoxydecane comes not from Boswellia carteri, but from a newly described frankincense species, Boswellia occulta. The presence of Boswellia occulta oil in essential oil sold as pure B. carteri, including certified organic oil, emphasizes the current lack of traceability in the supply chain and the ineffectiveness of organic certification to secure purity and sustainable harvesting in wildcrafted species.

Supporting a Culture of Evidence-Based Policy: Federal Funding for Public Health Law Evaluation Research, 1985-2014.

OBJECTIVE: Law powerfully influences health and can be a critical tool for promoting population well-being. Evaluation research is needed to measure the health effects of law and guide policy making and implementation. The purpose of this study was to assess trends in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for scientific public health law research (PHLR). METHODS: Using data from the UberResearch NIH grant repository, we collected and coded all grants with a focus on health law between FY'85 and FY'14 and then analyzed the grants by funding agency and topic areas. RESULTS: Between FY'85 and FY'14, NIH funded 510 research grants on health policy making, the health effects of laws or enforcement practices. On average, 4 PHLR grants were funded annually with a median total funding of $545 956 (range: $2535-$44 052 300) and a median annual funding of $205 223 (range: $2535-$7 019 517). CONCLUSIONS: National Institutes of Health has supported important PHLR but not nearly to the extent necessary to ensure that public health laws affecting the population are evaluated in a rigorous and timely manner. In addition to greater funding evaluation research, NIH can increase its support for creating legal datasets, fund training in PHLR, and work with the National Library of Medicine to create Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms related to PHLR.

Top Altmetric Scores in the Parkinson's Disease Literature.

A new class of social web-based metrics for scholarly publications (altmetrics) has surfaced as a complement to traditional citation-based metrics. Our aim was to study and characterize those recent papers in the field of Parkinson's disease which had received the highest Altmetric Attention Scores and to compare this attention measure to the traditional metrics. The top 20 papers in our analysis covered a variety of topics, mainly new disease mechanisms, treatment options and risk factors for the development of PD. The main media sources for these high attention papers were news items and Twitter. The papers were published predominantly in high impact journals, suggesting a correlation between altmetrics and conventional metrics. One paper published in a relatively modest journal received a significant amount of attention, reflecting that public attention does not always parallel the traditional metrics. None of the most influential papers in PD, as reviewed by Ponce and Lozano (2011) made it to our list, suggesting that recent publications receive higher attention scores, and that altmetrics may omit older, seminal work in the field.

The top 100 cited neurorehabilitation papers.

BACKGROUND: Neurorehabilitation covers a large range of disorders, assessment approaches and treatment methods. There have been previous citation analyses of rehabilitation and of its subfields. However, there has never been a comprehensive citation analysis in neurorehabilitation. OBJECTIVE: The present study reports findings from a citation analysis of the top 100 most cited neurorehabilitation papers to describe the research trends in the field. METHODS: A de-novo keyword search of papers indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database yielded 52,581 papers. A candidate pool of the 200 most-cited papers published between 2005 and 2016 was reviewed by the clinician authors. The papers in the top 100 deemed to be irrelevant were discarded and replaced by the most highly-cited articles in the second tier deemed to be clinically relevant. RESULTS: The most frequently cited neurorehablitation papers appeared in Stroke, Movement Disorders, and Neurology. Papers tended to focus on treatments, especially for stroke. Authorship trends suggest that top cited papers result from group endeavors, with 90% of the papers involving a collaboration among 3 or more authors. CONCLUSION: Treatment studies, often focused on stroke, appear to have the highest impact in the field of neurorehabilitation.

Cited references and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) as two different knowledge representations: clustering and mappings at the paper level.

For the biomedical sciences, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) make available a rich feature which cannot currently be merged properly with widely used citing/cited data. Here, we provide methods and routines that make MeSH terms amenable to broader usage in the study of science indicators: using Web-of-Science (WoS) data, one can generate the matrix of citing versus cited documents; using PubMed/MEDLINE data, a matrix of the citing documents versus MeSH terms can be generated analogously. The two matrices can also be reorganized into a 2-mode matrix of MeSH terms versus cited references. Using the abbreviated journal names in the references, one can, for example, address the question whether MeSH terms can be used as an alternative to WoS Subject Categories for the purpose of normalizing citation data. We explore the applicability of the routines in the case of a research program about the amyloid cascade hypothesis in Alzheimer's disease. One conclusion is that referenced journals provide archival structures, whereas MeSH terms indicate mainly variation (including novelty) at the research front. Furthermore, we explore the option of using the citing/cited matrix for main-path analysis as a by-product of the software.

PaTH: towards a learning health system in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The PaTH (University of Pittsburgh/UPMC, Penn State College of Medicine, Temple University Hospital, and Johns Hopkins University) clinical data research network initiative is a collaborative effort among four academic health centers in the Mid-Atlantic region. PaTH will provide robust infrastructure to conduct research, explore clinical outcomes, link with biospecimens, and improve methods for sharing and analyzing data across our diverse populations. Our disease foci are idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, atrial fibrillation, and obesity. The four network sites have extensive experience in using data from electronic health records and have devised robust methods for patient outreach and recruitment. The network will adopt best practices by using the open-source data-sharing tool, Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), at each site to enhance data sharing using centrally defined common data elements, and will use the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE) for distributed queries across the network.

A list of highly influential biomedical researchers, 1996-2011.

We have generated a list of highly influential biomedical researchers based on Scopus citation data from the period 1996-2011. Of the 15,153,100 author identifiers in Scopus, approximately 1% (n=149,655) have an h-index >=20. Of those, we selected 532 authors who belonged to the 400 with highest total citation count (>=25,142 citations) and/or the 400 with highest h-index (>=76). Of those, we selected the top-400 living core biomedical researchers based on a normalized score combining total citations and h-index. Another 62 authors whose focus is outside biomedicine had a normalized score that was at least as high as the score of the 400th core biomedical researcher. We provide information on the profile of these most influential authors, including the most common Medical Subject Heading terms in their articles that are also specific to their work, most common journals where they publish, number of papers with over 100 citations that they have published as first/single, last, or middle authors, and impact score adjusted for authorship positions, given that crude citation indices and authorship positions are almost totally orthogonal. We also show for each researcher the distribution of their papers across 4 main levels (basic-to-applied) of research. We discuss technical issues, limitations and caveats, comparisons against other lists of highly-cited researchers, and potential uses of this resource.

Productivity and Impact of the Top 100 Cited Huntington's Disease Investigators.

Huntington's disease (HD), research has grown dramatically over the last 25 years of research to the point where an analysis of productivity is warranted. We have compiled a list of the 100 most-cited researchers in HD together with H-Indices as a means to assess productivity and impact over the last 25 years. We also present a table of the most cited researchers of the last decade for comparison.

Productivity and impact of the top 100 cited Parkinson's disease investigators since 1985.

We have compiled a list of the 100 most cited researchers in Parkinson's disease since 1985 together with H-Indices as a means to assess productivity and impact. Within the total-citations ranking, "broad impact" citations are used as a way of identifying those researchers whose work is cited widely beyond the Parkinson's disease research community. Finally, we present a table of the most cited researchers this decade for a comparison of the two with analysis.

Alzheimer's disease research: scientific productivity and impact of the top 100 investigators in the field.

The online availability of scientific-literature databases and natural-language-processing (NLP) algorithms has enabled large-scale bibliometric studies within the field of scientometrics. Using NLP techniques and Thomson ISI reports, an initial analysis of the role of Alzheimer's disease (AD) within the neurosciences as well as a summary of the various research foci within the AD scientific community are presented. Citation analyses and productivity filters are applied to post-1984, AD-specific subsets of the PubMed and Thomson ISI Web-of-Science literature bases to algorithmically identify a pool of the top AD researchers. From the initial pool of AD investigators, top-100 rankings are compiled to assess productivity and impact. One of the impact and productivity metrics employed is an AD-specific H-index. Within the AD-specific H-index ranking, there are many cases of multiple AD investigators with similar or identical H-indices. In order to facilitate differentiation among investigators with equal or near-equal H indices, two derivatives of the H-index are proposed: the Second-Tier H-index and the Scientific Following H-index. Winners of two prestigious AD-research awards are highlighted, membership to the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences is acknowledged, and an analysis of highly-productive, high-impact, AD-research collaborations is presented.