Bibliometric Analysis of AANS/CNS Joint Section on Tumors (JST) Award Recipients

The AANS/CNS Joint Section on Tumors (JST) awards are given for tumor research and clinical achievements. Associations between scholarly awards and academic productivity in neurosurgery have not been thoroughly investigated. We explore associations between JST awards and measures of academic productivity to evaluate the relationship between scholarly output, fellowship training, and awarded recognition. Demographic information was collected from public data of 1671 academic neurosurgeons comprising 115 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education accredited institutions. h-index was queried from Scopus. The mean-Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) and weighted-RCR were gathered from the NIH iCite database from 2002-2020. JST award reception was determined from the JST official resource. RCR, h-index, and NIH funding were compared between neurosurgeons who received JST awards and those who did not, using multivariable linear regression. Analysis showed w-RCR was higher among award recipients (β=15.02; 95% CI:4.741,25.29; p<0.01), while m-RCR was not significantly different (β=-0.049, 95%CI 0.2214,0.1238; p=0.5336). h-index was higher among award winners (β=2.155; 95% CI 1.164,3.147; p=0.0008). Award recipients also received greater NIH funding (p<0.0001) and were positively associated with Oncology/Skull Base, General, and Radiosurgery subspecialty training. Receiving a JST award may be correlated with a more productive research career and establishes benchmark metrics for JST award winning. To our knowledge, this is one of the first analyses on this type of award winning in neurosurgery using both the h-index and the more recently created RCR.