According to a reasearch published by the Stanford University group, USA, where the contribution of more than 100,000 scientists around the world has been categorised, Dr Rajsekaran of Ganga Hospital has been recognised in the top 2% in the orthopedic surgery.

In the field of orthopaedic surgery, there are only two surgeons from India and he is the only one who has been categorised in the people worldwide who have contributed in the top 1% to the science of orthopaedic surgery.

The Stanford University group, USA created a publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists. The work was done by three of the top scientists John P.A. Ioannidis from the Department of Medicine, Stanford University, USA; Kevin W. Boyack of SciTech Strategies Inc, New Mexico, United States of America and Jeroen Baas from Research Intelligence, Elsevier, Amsterdam and published in the prestigious journal PLOS BIOLOGY (PLoS Bio 18(10); e3000918).

The authors used scopus data to compile a database of the 100,000 most cited across authors across all scientific fields based on their ranking of a composite indicator that considered six important citation metrics – total citations, Hirsch-h index, co-authorship-adjusted Schreiber hm-index, number of citations to papers as single author, number of citations to papers as single or first author, and number of citations to papers as single, first or last author.

The authors also refined the method of analysis by excluding self citations. For each author, separate data for career-long and single-year impact was calculated. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers were done. Scientists were classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles were also provided for all scientists.

Dr Rajasekaran’s research:

Dr Rajasekaran’s research in the field of orthopaedic surgery has mainly concentrated in the field of spinal infections, spinal deformity and low back pain. Of the numerous publications, the top 227 international papers of Dr S Rajasekaran were considered for the analysis.

Dr Rajasekaran’s first research paper was published in 1987, just as he completed his post graduation and this research focused on the problem of severe spinal deformities following spinal tuberculosis and other infections. This was published in the American Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery.

His research work mainly concentrates on the problem of low back pain, disc biology and the problem of severe spinal deformities. His scientific work forms a good example of bed to bedside research combining both clinical and basic science.

He set up the Ganga Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation(GOREF) in August 2002, which was approved by the Department of Science and Technology to fund the researchof the Ganga Research Centre which focuses on molecular level research to see how disc degeneration (which is the cause for more than 90% of back pain) can be prevented or even reversed.