Analyzing the Science Footprint of Richard P. Baum

Abstract

Determining the scientific footprint of a given author is not easy, as many bibliometric metrics exist and none can capture the full extent to which someone has fed the field with knowledge and changed the course of science. Using existing databases (Web of Science and iCite from the National Institute of Health), we tried to capture the impact of the work of Richard P. Baum over the last four decades. His works led to over 11,000 citations in the literature with highly cited articles, even when using the latest more valid practice of comparing the relative citation ratio that captures the scientific productivity independent of the field of study.

25.1 Introduction

In this work, we try to capture the footprint of Richard P. Baum in the scientific literature throughout his whole career, ranging from his first publication up to the time of this analysis (March 28, 2021). Since his scientific output encompasses many cited works, we limited our search to the Web of Science Database “Core Collection.”

25.2 Material and Methods

We searched the Web of Science Database “Core Collection” to export the abstract and full reference list of all articles using the search term “Richard P. Baum” as author. Results were exported in CSV format and imported in the VOSviewer version 1.6.16 [1] (Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands). VOSviewer has been developed to visualize bibliometric networks and has already been used in over 500 articles cited in the literature [2, 3]. For the Relative citation Ratio (RCR) we used the iCite Database, which contains 26,482,789 articles in PubMed as of March 8, 2021 and which is freely available at https://icite.od.nih.gov, applying the methodology described by Hutchins et al. [4].

25.3 Results

The Web of Science search returned 715 publication records for Richard P. Baum as an author as of March 28, 2021 (https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/general-summary?q=W3siZiI6IkRYTkciLCJ0IjoiMjMyOCJ9XQ). This results in a h-index of 51 for a sum of times cited totaling 11,247 (10,641 without self-citations) and 8020 citing articles (7837 without self-citations). The evaluation of the sum of times cited per year metrics is presented in Fig. 25.1, and the overall average citation per item is 15.73. In terms of number of publications per year, there has always been a sustained scientific production, with a steady increase during the last 20 years and an almost doubled publication output during the last decade (Fig. 25.1). In all these records, Richard P. Baum was cited most often as last author (41%) and as first author (13%). Furthermore, he was corresponding author in 8% of the records. When examining the publication types, meeting abstracts, articles, and editorials constitute the majority of the records with 59%, 30%, and 4%, respectively, followed by reviews, proceeding papers, and review articles (each 4%, respectively).

Fig. 25.1

Bar chart of the sum of times cited per year and the number of publications per year of Richard P. Baum over the 1981–2020 interval

Overall, eight articles were found to be highly cited in the field, as listed in Table 25.1. Alone, these eight articles are responsible for 3155 citation (28% of the total times cited) for an impressing average of 394.28 citation par article.

Table 25.1 Highly cited articles from Richard P. Baum totaling 3155 citation (3151 without self-citations) for an average of 394.28 citation par article

When all these 715 publications are grouped in five most frequent subject categories, most of the records were in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Medical Imaging (n = 471 or 65%) and Oncology (n = 131 or 18%) as shown in Fig. 25.2. The country of origin of the publication records is shown in Fig. 25.3 for the seven most frequent countries.

Fig. 25.2

Treemap visualization of Richard P. Baum 715 publication records grouped in five Web of Science categories

Fig. 25.3

Treemap visualization of Richard P. Baum articles grouped in seven countries of 715 records

The VOSviewer was used to display a co-occurrence network of terms extracted from the titles and abstracts of the selected publications as previously described [3]. The result is displayed in Fig. 25.4. The size of the circles displays the number of times the term was found in the title or the abstract. Furthermore, the terms that co-occur are located close to each other in the visualization. All terms were also grouped in three clusters of significant size. The details are given in the legend of Fig. 25.4. Using the same data, cluster density visualization was performed and allowed to better examine the co-occurrence terms with the weight of the color depending on the number of items belonging to that cluster (Fig. 25.5).

Fig. 25.4

Co-occurrence network of terms using the VOSviewer visualization software of terms extracted from the titles and abstracts of the selected 715 publications of Richard P. Baum. The size of the circles displays the number of times the term was found in the title or the abstract. The 85 terms that co-occur are located close to each other and grouped in three clusters of significant size (in green peptide receptor radionuclide therapy of neuroendocrine tumors, in blue efficacy and PSMA therapy and in red PET and detection). The 1000 strongest links are represented

Fig. 25.5

Using the same data as in Fig. 25.4, this cluster density visualization displays the co-occurrence terms with weight of the color depending on the number of items belonging to that cluster (in green peptide receptor radionuclide therapy of neuroendocrine tumors, in blue efficacy and PSMA therapy and in red PET and detection)

When examining the scientific themes development of Richard P. Baum over time, one can see that it started with monoclonal antibodies around year 2000, then moved to PET diagnosis around 2005 before evolving to peptide receptor radionuclide therapy of neuroendocrine tumors and its efficacy (2010) before moving on to PSMA therapy starting in 2015, as shown in the overlay visualization of Fig. 25.6. Finally, the last overlay visualization of Fig. 25.7 shows the number of average citations per co-occurrence term, demonstrating variation of up to fourfold among co-occurrence terms.

Fig. 25.6

Overlay visualization of the same co-occurrence cluster data showing the development over average citation year of Richard P. Baum publications, starting with monoclonal antibodies (around year 2000), then PET diagnosis (2005), peptide receptor radionuclide therapy of neuroendocrine tumors and its efficacy (2010) PSMA (starting 2015). The 1000 strongest links are represented

Fig. 25.7

Overlay visualization of the average citations per co-occurrence terms showing the number of times each term was cited in average in Richard P. Baum publications. The color scale shows between 20 and 80 citations per co-occurrence term

To round off this analysis of Richard P. Baum’s footprint in science, we were interested in one of the latest academic metrics available, the so-called Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), which is a different bibliometric assessment of scientific productivity as compared to the usual ones (journal’s impact factor, h-index) to assess publications. With the RCR, the number of citations is compared to an expected citation rate of all articles derived from the same field [4]. Lately, this new metrics has been advocated as a more valid practice to identify influential papers across all disciplines. When applying this easy analysis in iCite (Fig. 25.8), one discovers that the median RCR of Richard P. Baum was 1.46 with a range from 0–76.41 (Fig. 25.8). This is above the 80th percentile of all articles in iCite with a RCR above 0 (19,859,778 publications as of March 8, 2021). Furthermore, most of his articles contained in PubMed and listed in iCites are above the 50th percentile of all the publications with a RCR above 0, which would correspond to a 50th percentile RCR of 0.37. Finally, Richard P. Baum has ten publications with a RCR above the 99th percentile of all PubMed articles (RCR > 7.98) and three above the 99.9th percentile (RCR > 23.62) with a maximum at 76.41. The RCR for the eight highly cited articles is also presented in Table 25.1.

Fig. 25.8

Distribution of the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) of Richard P. Baum articles contained in the iCite Database of the NIH accessible at https://icite.od.nih.gov over the 1980–2020 period [4]. His median RCR is 1.46, which is above the 80th percentile of all publication contained in the iCite database. Most of his iCite Database publications (85%) are above the 50th percentile of all publications in the iCite Database which corresponds to a RCR of 0.37

25.4 Discussion

The publication record of Richard P. Baum is truly impressive as outlined in the results section, leading to over 11,000 citations and 725 records in the Web of Science Database. Not only are his standard bibliometric metrics such as his h-index or the journal’s impact factors excellent, but the latest more valid metrics of scientific productivity as the relative Citation ratio (RCR) is equally impressive with most of his articles being cited more often than half of the articles with a RCR in PubMed, with ten of his articles being even cited more often than 99% of all PubMed articles.

The results presented here constitute only a bibliometric analysis of the work of Richard P. Baum and is forcedly reducing his work to mere citations. On a personal note, one should say that knowing Richard is clearly superior to reading his work, as anyone who has interacted with him will agree that he has impressive interpersonal skills, making encounters with Richard highly memorable. With his presence, energy, positivism and eagerness to pragmatically solve the next scientific problems, he has always been one of the outstanding characters in our field – and it maybe not even be saying too much when characterizing him as a “Rockstar in Nuclear Medicine,” also characterized by coming too late to a session and leaving early when getting bored. This honesty and clarity made him an excellent dinner conversation partner. His openness for exploiting novel routes and methods, which have led him to be oftentimes the first one (sometimes only one) to bring novel radiopharmaceuticals and radionuclides to his patients, cannot be captured appropriately with bibliometric metrics, showing us its limitations. Life is about stories, not about numbers.

As a limitation to our analysis, one should mention that the profile of Richard P. Baum in the Web of Science and PubMed databases was algorithmically generated, which means Richard P. Baum himself did not verify all founds records. Furthermore, as these databases are continuously updated, the number of citations in this chapter was found as of March 28, 2021 and will keep on increasing daily and forever, as long as new articles will cite the work of Richard P. Baum.

25.5 Conclusion

The present analysis outlined the scientific publication footprint of Richard P. Baum over the last four decades in the domain of nuclear medicine and therapy. He helped to shape the field of neuroendocrine tumors diagnosis and therapy, as well as prostate cancer radionuclide therapy. His scientific productivity was constant since 1980 and even doubled during the last decade. His works have been cited over 11,000 times in the literature and even when using the latest metrics of scientific productivity such as the relative citation rate, his bibliometric achievements remain outstanding and are only matched by very few authors among the many with a similarly long scientific career.

Acknowledgments/Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that no conflict of interest exist.