Disease Specific Productivity of American Cancer Hospitals

CONTEXT: Research-oriented cancer hospitals in the United States treat and study patients with a range of diseases. Measures of disease specific research productivity, and comparison to overall productivity, are currently lacking. HYPOTHESIS: Different institutions are specialized in research of particular diseases. OBJECTIVE: To report disease specific productivity of American cancer hospitals, and propose a summary measure. METHOD: We conducted a retrospective observational survey of the 50 highest ranked cancer hospitals in the 2013 US News and World Report rankings. We performed an automated search of PubMed and Clinicaltrials.gov for published reports and registrations of clinical trials (respectively) addressing specific cancers between 2008 and 2013. We calculated the summed impact factor for the publications. We generated a summary measure of productivity based on the number of Phase II clinical trials registered and the impact factor of Phase II clinical trials published for each institution and disease pair. We generated rankings based on this summary measure. RESULTS: We identified 6076 registered trials and 6516 published trials with a combined impact factor of 44280.4, involving 32 different diseases over the 50 institutions. Using a summary measure based on registered and published clinical trails, we ranked institutions in specific diseases. As expected, different institutions were highly ranked in disease-specific productivity for different diseases. 43 institutions appeared in the top 10 ranks for at least 1 disease (vs 10 in the overall list), while 6 different institutions were ranked number 1 in at least 1 disease (vs 1 in the overall list). CONCLUSION: Research productivity varies considerably among the sample. Overall cancer productivity conceals great variation between diseases. Disease specific rankings identify sites of high academic productivity, which may be of interest to physicians, patients and researchers.