2059 Comparing the H-index and Relative Citation Ratio as Measures of Academic Productivity in Neurosurgery

INTRODUCTION: Evaluation of academic productivity has been a cornerstone of the medical research community. The Hirsch index (h-index) is a popular tool for assessing academic productivity in neurosurgery but is associated with several limitations. The National Institutes of Health has developed a field-normalized, article-level metric, termed the "relative citation ratio" (RCR), that circumvents several of the h-index's shortcomings and attempts to assess research productivity accurately. METHODS: A retrospective cross-sectional analysis was conducted using publicly available data on neurosurgeons employed at 115 ACGME-accredited neurological surgery programs. Demographic and training data were collected using institutional websites. RCR was calculated using the NIH iCite tool; the h-index was calculated using Scopus. Mean RCR (m-RCR) is the average score of the author's articles. Weighted RCR (w-RCR) is the sum of all article scores. RESULTS: The study included 3,409 neurosurgeons, with males comprising 82.9% and attending physicians accounting for 54.3%. Most neurosurgeons (57.1%) started residency after 2010, with 53.8% having 0-10 years of practice. Significant differences were found in h-index, mean-RCR, and w-RCR across gender, position, faculty rank, years in practice, and subspecialty (p<0.001 for all comparisons). Neuro-oncology had the highest mean-RCR and h-index, while spine had the lowest w-RCR. Mean-RCR was less affected by minor variations in career duration compared to h-index and w-RCR. The correlation between each metric and career duration was highest for h-index (r=0.61, p<0.001), followed by w-RCR (r=0.37, p<0.001) and mean-RCR (r=0.11, p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: While h-index, mean-RCR, and w-RCR exhibited similar trends in assessing academic productivity, mean-RCR demonstrated the weakest correlation with career duration, suggesting that m-RCR may be a superior complementary tool to the h-index for evaluating academic productivity in neurosurgery, potentially mitigating the disadvantages early-career neurosurgeons face.