Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine has been ranked fourth among federally funded U.S. universities based on the average number of citations per research paper published in indexed journals of gastroenterology and hepatology between 1999 and 2003.
VCU’s Division of Gastroenterology in the Department of Internal Medicine deals with the field of medicine concerned with the function and disorders of the digestive system, including the liver.
“The principal factor contributing to this is the core belief that our job is not only to provide state of the art care to patients but to advance the understanding and knowledge related to gastrointestinal (GI) and liver diseases,” said Arun J. Sanyal, M.D., chair of VCU’s Division of Gastroenterology.
VCU published 90 gastroenterology and hepatology-related papers during the period reviewed by Thomson ISI Essential Science Indicators — a resource that enables researchers to conduct ongoing, quantitative analyses of research performance and to track trends in science. VCU’s papers received an average of 12.42 citations each.
The No.1-ranked university was the University of Chicago with 13.62 citations per paper, followed by Yale University with 13.18 citations per paper and New York University with 12.82 citations per paper. VCU followed in the No. 4 spot and the University of Southern California was the No. 5 university with 12.25 citations per paper.
Along with Sanyal, some of VCU’s most cited investigators include Mitchell L. Shiffman, M.D.; Gabriel M. Makhlouf, M.D., Ph.D.; John Grider, Ph.D.; Karnam S. Murthy, M.D.; and Philip B. Hylemon, M.D.