Emre Demir

Bibliometric analysis on global Behçet disease publications during 1980–2014: is there a Silk Road in the literature?

Behçet disease (BD) is a chronic and multisystemic vasculitis characterized with recurrent oral and genital ulcers, uveitis, arthritis and skin manifestations. The highest prevalence of the disease has been reported in regions historically involved in the Silk Road routes.

A preliminary study of the contribution of telemicroscopy to the diagnosis and management of skin tumours in teledermatology.

Dermatology images can be acquired using a miniature handheld digital microscope at magnifications of 10- to 30-fold. We investigated the contribution of telemicroscopy to the reliability and accuracy of teledermatology for skin tumours. In a retrospective study of the reliability of diagnosis and management plans, two dermatologists compared teledermatology with face-to-face assessment. We also measured the accuracy of diagnosis by comparing teledermatology with histopathological examination. Two dermatologists evaluated the clinical images and information for 120 randomly sorted cases and recorded a diagnosis and a management plan for each case. Two months later, the same dermatologists re-evaluated the cases and suggested a new diagnosis and management plan for each case. The reliability of teledermatology diagnosis was not significantly different from face-to-face examination; it was significantly increased with the addition of microscopic images (P < 0.001). The reliability of teledermatology management plans was not significantly different from face-to-face examination; it was significantly increased with the addition of the microscopic images (P < 0.001). The accuracy of teledermatology was significantly increased with microscopic images (P = 0.05). Telemicroscopy appears to be a useful adjunct to teledermatology with a digital camera. Future studies with different magnifications should be performed to detect the optimum magnification for telemicroscopy.

Which Bariatric Procedure Is the Most Popular in the World? A Bibliometric Comparison

ObjectiveThis study aims to make a bibliometric analysis of the most commonly performed bariatric procedures between the years 2006 and 2016 and identify the most popular procedure in the field of bariatric surgery (BS).BackgroundDespite the fact that BS popularity has been increasing considerably in recent years, the literature indicates insufficient information regarding the comparison of the methods used in BS.MethodsThe terms “Sleeve Gastrectomy,” “Gastric Bypass,” or “Gastric Band” were searched in Web of Science for the years between 1980 and 2016. All the publications found were subjected to bibliometric analysis.ResultsWoS database included 3501 publications about the sleeve gastrectomy keyword, 7278 publications about the gastric bypass keyword, and 2692 publications about the gastric band keyword. USA was found to be the most active country in all methods, and the authors who had most publications were Gagner M (64, 1.8%) for sleeve gastrectomy, Le Roux CW (83, 1.1%) for gastric bypass, and O’brien PE (50, 1.9%) for gastric band. “Obesity Surgery” was the journal that contributed most to the literature in all three obesity surgery procedures.ConclusionDespite the fact that the top procedure was Roux-en-Y gastric bypass in terms of bibliometrics, the most popular procedure was found to be sleeve gastrectomy. According to the percentage of the increase in publications and citations, sleeve gastrectomy was found to be the method which showed the highest increase rates in recent years.

Correction to: Which Bariatric Procedure Is the Most Popular in the World? A Bibliometric Comparison

Some of the dates in the above published article were listed incorrectly; the correct details are shown below. The authors apologize for the mistaken text.

Bibliometric analysis of apitherapy in complementary medicine literature between 1980 and 2016

Apitherapy is the medical use and the application of honey bee products and in recent years there has been a growing interest in studies of this field. We aimed to perform a bibliometric study in the apitherapy literature. We used Web of Science database in this study and our search retrieved a total of 6917 documents of which great majority (82.4%) was original articles. Brazil was found to ranked first on the publication number with 889 papers followed by the USA, China, Japan and Turkey. We measured a productivity score for each country and the most productive countries in apitherapy field were Switzerland (2.978), Croatia (2.074), and Bulgaria (1.840). Propolis was the most used keyword followed by bee venom, flavonoids, apis mellifera and apoptosis. A moderate correlation was detected between number of publications and GDP. To the best of our knowledge our study was the first in this area and we proposed that further studies should be supported in this field.

Serum Oxidative Stress Levels in Patients with Nasal Septal Deviation

Objective Comparison of the total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS) and paraoxonase (PON1) serum levels in patients with nasal septum deviation (NSD) and healthy subjects. Methods The TAS, TOS, and PON1 serum levels of 47 patients with NSD (mean age 35.3) and 50 healthy subjects (mean age 37.8) were compared in this study. Results We found significantly higher TAS levels in the control group (p<0.001). The mean TAS value was 1.196 mmoL/L in the control group, whereas it was 1.046 mmoL/L in the NSD group. On the other hand, TOS was significantly higher in the NSD group (p<0.001). We found that the mean TOS value was 6.600 mmoL/L in the control group, and 20.194 mmoL/L in the NSD group. The NSD and control groups had similar PON1 levels (p=0.446). The mean PON1 value was 279.64 U/L in the control group, and 324.21 U/L in the NSD group. Conclusion We detected higher TOS and lower TAS levels in patients with NSD compared to healthy subjects. These results indicate that patients with NSD are exposed to oxidative stress.

COMPARISON OF SOME CLASSICAL AND META-HEURISTIC OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES IN THE ESTIMATION OF THE LOGIT MODEL PARAMETERS.

Ozge Akkus 1 and Emre Demir 2 . 1. Department of Statistics, Faculty of Science,Mugla Sıtkı Kocman University, Turkey. 2. Department of Biostatistics, Faculity of Medicine, Hitit University, Turkey. ...................................................................................................................... Manuscript Info Abstract ......................... ........................................................................ Manuscript History

A STUDY ON THE FACTORS AFFECTING THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF DİSTANCE EDUCATİON STUDENTS AND FORMAL STUDENTS

Recently the numbers of distance education programs and students enrolling in them have increased significantly. This increase also carries the question of what factors may have an effect on academic success. The demographic features, motivation levels, personal development status and basic computer literacy of students have been taken into account and their effects on the academic success of students have been analyzed. With this purpose, surveys prepared with the help of professional opinion have been applied to certain groups. The sample group of this study consists students of the Kirikkale University Distance Education Center and the formal education students of the Kirikkale Vocational School. The results have been analyzed with the help of the SPSS data analysis program (version 22.0) and have been turned into figures. The academic success of distance learning students and formal education students have been compared and this data has been used to identify whether there are any significant connections between academic success and the factors determined. In the conclusion of this study, the figures have been explained separately, and suggestions have been made regarding both distance education and formal education.