Quantifying Cooperation among Investigators with Substantial Production in Operating Room Management [Letter]

Dear editor

Wang et al used the Web of Science to perform a bibliometric study of operating room management articles.¹ We recently performed a similar study using Scopus.² The databases include many publications that overlap but some that differ, making their use complementary. Furthermore, the two studies addressed different questions.^1,2 Notably, Wang et al examined the cooperation among authors with many publications in the field.¹ This is a good addition, but their counts by authors differ from ours, substantively more than we would expect from database and search protocol differences.

In Wang et al’s Figure 4, “Franklin Dexter” and “F Dexter” both had multiple publications. They appear to have been treated as distinct authors but are the same person. “Richard H. Epstein” and “R Epstein” also represent the same individual, as are “Johannes Ledolter” and “J Ledolter”, but each pair looks in the figure to be distinct. Likely there are many other examples, not exposed in Figure 4 because only the highest publishing names are displayed. We request that the authors redo their analysis after name disambiguation, a step that is recommended for bibliographic studies performed at the author level,³ and present revised versions of Figure 4 and Table 4. Because Web of Science uses both its ResearcherID and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD) for author identification and lists alternative presentations of their names, this should be straightforward for the authors with multiple related publications (ie, those who would appear in Figure 4).