Identifying Research-Active Specialists at an Academic Medical Center: A Case Study.

How might one identify, via publicly accessible websites, research-active specialists at an academic medical center? As a case study, health-informatics specialists were identified at two academic medical centers: University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, and University of Maryland-Baltimore. Four types of data about researchers were sought: frequency of publication, frequency of citations, money from grants, and patents. Based on frequency of published articles, one center favored bioinformatics and cardiology, whereas the other produced more results in nursing and radiology. Interestingly, different patterns were found across different data sets. This bibliometric method contrasted with the method of searching for active researchers via a web portal showing board-certified specialists at a particular institution. This alternative approach was tried for informatics and sleep medicine, and the bibliometric method seemed to produce better recall and precision.