Review Frontiers in chronic fatigue syndrome research: An analysis of the top 100 most influential articles in the field, 2023, Wang

Free full text:
https://journals.lww.com/md-journal...chronic_fatigue_syndrome_research__an.82.aspx

RESEARCH ARTICLE: NARRATIVE REVIEW
Frontiers in chronic fatigue syndrome research: An analysis of the top 100 most influential articles in the field

Wang, Xingxin MDa; Li, Xuhao MDa; Dong, Tiantian MDa; Yu, Wenyan MDa; Jia, Zhixia MDb; Chen, Jun MDa,*

Author Information
Medicine 102(46) : p e35754, November 17, 2023. | DOI: 10.1097/MD.0000000000035754

• OPEN

Abstract

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a complex constellation of symptoms that significantly reduces the quality of life among affected individuals and increases public health expenditures.

We conducted a search on the Web of Science Core Collection database and selected the top 100 cited articles in the field of CFS.

Several literature analysis tools, including CiteSpace 6.1.R6, VOSviewer 1.6.19, and Scimago Graphica 1.0.30, were utilized to integrate the most influential research papers and academic journals in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the CFS field.

The top 100 highly-cited publications were published in 67 reputable journals, with contributions from 250 institutions across 26 countries/regions involved in CFS research.

This demonstrates the extensive attention and coverage of CFS research by high-quality academic journals and institutions, highlighting the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of CFS studies.

The journal with the highest publication volume and total citations was Lancet.

The top 5 co-occurring keywords were chronic fatigue syndrome, cognitive behavior therapy, epidemiology, definition, and disorders, indicating the ongoing attention researchers have devoted to the diagnostic criteria and clinical studies of CFS.

Cluster analysis results suggested that primary care, infectious retrovirus, gene expression, and metabolomics may become the focal points and trends in future CFS research.

The prospective research directions in this field include the search for biological markers, with a particular focus on immunology; the advancement of diagnostic techniques; the screening of risk genes associated with CFS; and the conduct of epidemiological investigations.

 

Demand to publish meets clickbait. Should be in the "Journal of Pointless Lists." Author affialiation = 'School of Acupuncture-Moxibustion' !?!

 

I don't think infectious retrovirus will become one of the focal points and trends in future CFS research.

They probably picked up the XMRV papers as these were published in prestigious journals and did not bother to read them or see how the story ended.

 

Interesting to see that this is published in a journal that has been going for 102 years but nobody has ever heard of and all the authors now are either Chinese or possibly Venezuelan (maybe some Japanese).

All the authors of this paper are 'MD', which is strange because MD is in the USA just an indication of being medically qualified and so not something you put by your name in a journal, or in the UK a postgraduate degree that few people now use (it is now almost all PhD).

I think this could be a group of AI robots who have managed to invent a journal to write a paper in so that other AI robots can invent further journals to write more papers in until there is an infinite number of papers being written in an infinite number of journals. This being the case it is certain that at least one of these papers will actually be the verbatim text of Henry IVth Part I by William Shakespeare.

So the robots are on the way to winning at their own game.
But the cunning plan is to completely ignore them and then none of the papers will actually be red (or black and white).

 

Correspondence: Jun Chen, School of Acupuncture-Moxibustion and Tuina, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan 250355, China (e-mail: juston521@163.com).

That email address is not an academic affiliation. The domain 163.com has a front page worse than the Daily Mail. This is its Wikipedia entry. The School of Acupuncture-Moxibustion and Tuina, Shandong University has its own domain (https://english.bucm.edu.cn/index.htm).

Senior author's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4645-6623

 

I don't want to get political here. Maybe AI can leap over my innate prejudice against science getting interested in traditional Chinese medicine for possible new leads, as the Shandong University blurb for international students writes.

 

This does not mean much - outside of Western countries, many researchers use mail addresses that are not affiliated to their institutions (often Gmail ones). In China I believe that 163.com is one of the largest email service providers.

 

Just echoing the point above - 163.com is a huge email provider, lots of our students use them amongst a few others (qq.com etc) and they tend to not use their academic emails once registered with us as they do so much from their smartphones. Our institutional tools don't always play nice with their phones, so they revert to their personal ones.

It looks like they're using the CRediT taxonomy for contributions which is interesting - the article and journal read a bit like a publication ground for student group projects, given the commonality across methods and the large number of different names appearing. I suspect Jonathan might be right in AI having a heavy hand here, too.