Hepatology is a competitive medical specialty with an exponential increase of publications. Key idea of this study is to highlight key authors of the specialty, trying to identify raising stars too.

BioPredictive R&D teams have used Google Scholar to identify all the publications from AASLD authors, and the citations of these publications, in order to compute h-index from Hirsch. The index "h" (a reference for the bibliographists) represents the number of publications cited at least h times in the literature. It identifies the productive authors whose work becomes a reference. The higher h-index, the more the author is a reference.

To avoid a bias in the age of authors, we have divided the population into 4 : "dinosaurs" publishing since more than 20 years, "seniors" publishing since 10 to 20 years, "juniors" publishing since 5 to 10 years et "babies" publishing since less than 5 years.

The results of this work is presented in real time on the site HepaTop. The results on the site are directly computed from the algorithms presented here and updated every month. The classification by age (dinosaurs, seniors, juniors and babies) is relevant, highlighting both eminences known in the art (dinosaurs), the confirmed authors (seniors) but also no-doubt future leaders (juniors, babies).

Consult HepaTop and its methodology.