Academic Medical Leadership in Iraq: Researchgate Ranking

Abstract

Background: Bibliometric assessments have been used to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the scientific/research productivity of medical leaders and academic medical leaders. However, emphasis has been increasingly made that paying no attention to the order and authorship role of the researcher being evaluated may lead to a misleading H-index that is completely not relevant to academic leadership determination purpose. Therefore, Researchgate has emerged as the single most important tool for the evaluation of physicians’ academic stature, prowess, and scholar productivity, and also for the evaluation of academic leadership. Materials and methods: More than 200 Researchgate profiles were examined during the last four days of August 2021 with aim of determining Iraqi academic medical leaders who have a scientific reputation (RG) Score at Researchgate of 40 or higher. Results: Aamir Jalal Al-Mosawi was the Iraqi academic medical leader who had the highest RG Score of 40.46. Only two Iraqi physicians had RG Score at Researchgate of 40 or higher including Aamir Jalal Al-Mosawi. Conclusion: During the last four days of August, 2021, Aamir Jalal Al-Mosawi was the Iraqi academic medical leader with the highest RG score at Researchgate. The findings in this study confirm that researchgate is more appropriate for academic medical leadership as it reduce to some extent the influence of misleadingly high H-index that is not relevant to academic leadership deterioration resulting from joining large number of collaborative studies.