SleepTalker June 2021

Joy Schabel, MD

   I had the pleasure of attending the SOM graduation. We have 4 Stony Brook SOM grads joining our department as residents this July. Left to right: Adam Bindelglass, Justin Bell, me, Joe Fiola and Xin Chen. Welcome!

Family News

Ursula Landman, DO

  Matthew graduated SUNY Albany Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts East Asian Studies. Sarah completed her freshman year at SUNY Binghamton Dean's list. She is Pre-Med and looking forward to shadowing. William continues to write for the Sci-fi show Raised by Wolves on HBOMax. We are so so proud of all their accomplishments!

Tazeen Beg, MD

   Our daughter Amber graduated from Boston University with a major in Anthropology. She plans to pursue a Master's in Public Health.

Ramanjot S. Kang, MD

  We now have a Twitter page! Follow our new Stony Brook Department of Anesthesiology Twitter account @stonybrookanes

  Stay up to date on department news, new research, upcoming events, and everything else! To setup your own Twitter account go to: twitter.com/signup

  Have your posts featured on any of our social media accounts by using the #SBAnesthesia

James P Dilger, PhD

   Two, random, publication-rated things from the past few weeks.

   1. I am not an active participant in social media. Granted, I do have twitter and instagram accounts (and follow our department's activity on them), but I seldom post anything. Facebook - no thanks! But I am present on ResearchGate (Facebook for scientists?). They graciously post for me whenever I publish a paper or abstract and also stroke my ego by sending me an email notifying me of any citations of my papers. Usually, I glance at the email and say "that's nice" and promptly delete it. The other day, however, I did a double-take when I read that I was cited by this paper:

   I don't remember writing anything about free will since the philosophy class I took as an undergrad. It turns out that the author used (with publisher's permission) a figure showing ion channel activity from a paper I'd published in 1991! Wow! I just had to tell one of my co-authors about it. Namely, David Poppers, older brother of our own Jeremy Poppers, and son of our Founding Chairman Paul Poppers! David did a project in my lab as a high school student and contributed to this paper.

   2. I usually have good things to say about Google (not just because my son-in-law works for them). But I recently made an exception. As an editor of BMC Anesthesiology, I was asked to edit a manuscript that they received. The authors had done a retrospective study to compare the number of citations of various anesthetic drugs in PubMed, compared to Google. Although I could easily think of a dozen reasons why I wouldn't like the manuscript just based on the abstract, I agreed to edit it. I was pleased to see that the authors used some advanced Google search tools, namely that the webpage had to have the name of an anesthetic in its title, that the article had to be in English, and it had to be published within a certain 5-year period. I decided to repeat one of their searches: “allintitle: Midazolam”, during 1983-1987, English pages. I got ten hits, which agreed with the number given in one of the manuscript's tables. So far, so good! But I took a closer look. Those of you who are old enough will probably recognize that this time period predates wide access to the internet. The authors do note this. So, just what are these hits? Well, they are all scientific articles, of course! Two of the hits referred to the same article, posted in two different places. One article was in German (I suppose springer.com is considered an English "page" by Google). One article was from 2019 (beats me)! At the bottom of the search page, Google says:

   Inclusion of the omitted results produced a total of 95 hits!

   My conclusion was that a) Google includes PubMed indexed articles (you already knew that, I'm sure), b) the same article may be found at more than one url (not a surprise either), c) the language filter is not perfect, d) the time period filter is not perfect, e) the top ten hits is not the extent of the googleverse (as a teenager I knew that the 10 ten hits was not the extent of the musicverse). Given these limitations, I could not trust anything presented in the manuscript, so I rejected it without further review.