Person:

Vlassakov, Kamen

The aim of this study was to assess progress in the field of anesthetic drugs over the past 30 years using scientometric indices: popularity indices (general and specific), representing the proportion of articles on a drug relative to all articles in the field of anesthetics (general index) or the subfield of a specific class of anesthetics (specific index); index of change, representing the degree of growth in publications on a topic from one period to the next; index of expectations, representing the ratio of the number of articles on a topic in the top 20 journals relative to the number of articles in all (>5,000) biomedical journals covered by PubMed; and index of ultimate success, representing a publication outcome when a new drug takes the place of a common drug previously used for the same purpose. Publications on 58 topics were assessed during six 5-year periods from 1984 to 2013. Our analysis showed that during 2009–2013, out of seven anesthetics with a high general popularity index (≥2.0), only two were introduced after 1980, ie, the inhaled anesthetic sevoflurane and the local anesthetic ropivacaine; however, only sevoflurane had a high index of expectations (12.1). Among anesthetic adjuncts, in 2009–2013, only one agent, sugammadex, had both an extremely high index of change (>100) and a high index of expectations (25.0), reflecting the novelty of its mechanism of action. The index of ultimate success was positive with three anesthetics, ie, lidocaine, isoflurane, and propofol, all of which were introduced much longer than 30 years ago. For the past 30 years, there were no new anesthetics that have produced changes in scientometric indices indicating real progress.

The aim of this study was to assess progress in the field of anesthesia monitoring over the past 40 years using scientometric analysis. The following scientometric indexes were used: popularity indexes (general and specific), representing the proportion of articles on either a topic relative to all articles in the field of anesthetics (general popularity index, GPI) or the subfield of anesthesia monitoring (specific popularity index, SPI); index of change (IC), representing the degree of growth in publications on a topic from one period to the next; and index of expectations (IE), representing the ratio of the number of articles on a topic in the top 20 journals relative to the number of articles in all (>5,000) biomedical journals covered by PubMed. Publications on 33 anesthesia-monitoring topics were assessed. Our analysis showed that over the past 40 years, the rate of rise in the number of articles on anesthesia monitoring was exponential, with an increase of more than eleven-fold, from 296 articles over the 5-year period 1974–1978 to 3,394 articles for 2009–2013. This rise profoundly exceeded the rate of rise of the number of articles on general anesthetics. The difference was especially evident with the comparison of the related GPIs: stable growth of the GPI for anesthesia monitoring vs constant decline in the GPI for general anesthetics. By the 2009–2013 period, among specific monitoring topics introduced after 1980, the SPI index had a meaningful magnitude (≥1.5) in 9 of 24 topics: Bispectral Index (7.8), Transesophageal Echocardiography (4.2), Electromyography (2.8), Pulse Oximetry (2.4), Entropy (2.3), Train-of-four (2.3), Capnography (1.9), Pulse Contour (1.9), and Electrical Nerve Stimulation for neuromuscular monitoring (1.6). Only one of these topics (Pulse Contour) demonstrated (in 2009–2013) high values for both IC and IE indexes (76 and 16.9, respectively), indicating significant recent progress. We suggest that rapid growth in the field of anesthetic monitoring was one of the most important developments to compensate for the intrinsically low margins of safety of anesthetic agents.