(p. 51) . . . it is essential, if at all possible, to have a go-to physician expert and authority when one has a newly diagnosed, serious condition, such as a brain or, neurologic conditions like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, heart valve abnormality. How do you find that individual doctor?
In order to leverage the Internet and gain access to state-of-the-art expertise, you need to identify the physician who conducts the leading research in the field. Let’s pick pancreatic cancer as an example of a serious condition that often proves to be rapidly fatal. The first step is to go to Google Scholar and find the top-cited articles for that condition by typing in “pancreatic cancer.” They are generally listed in order by descending number of citations. Look for the senior, last author of the articles. The last author of the top-listed paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology from 1997 is Daniel D. Von Hoff, with over 2,000 citations (“cited by … ” appears at the end of each hit). Now you may have identified an expert. Enter “Daniel Von Hoff” into PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pubmed) to see how many papers he has published: 567. Most are related to pancreatic cancer or cancer research.
(p. 52) Now go back to Google Scholar and enter his name, and you’ll see over 24,000 hits–this number includes papers that cite his work. There are some problems with these websites, since getting citations by other peer-reviewed publications takes time; if a breakthrough paper is published, it will be years to accumulate hundreds, if not thousands, of citations. Thus, the lag time or incubation phase of citations may result in missing a rising star. If it is a common name, there may be admixture of citations of different researchers with the same name, albeit different topics, so it is useful to enter in all elements including the middle initial and to scan the topic list to alleviate that problem. For perspective, a paper that has been cited 1,000 times by others is rare and would be considered a classic. In this example, the top paper by Von Hoff in 1997 is a long time ago, and he is no longer at the University of Texas, San Antonio-he moved to Phoenix, Arizona. How would you find that out? Look for Daniel D. Von Hoff using a search engine such as Google or Bing, and look up his profile on Wikipedia. Without any help from any doctor, you will have found the country’s leading authority on pancreatic cancer. And you will have also identified some backups at Johns Hopkins using the same methodology.
Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
(Note: initial ellipsis added; parenthetical ellipsis in original.)