A young doctor's "horrible" quoted article

Dr. Hoang Van Thuan is currently a lecturer in family medicine, Deputy Head of the strong research group on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases of Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy.

The young doctor born in 1988 said that his first international publication in 2018 until the end of 2019 had only 33 citations on Google Scholar.

However, articles in the 2020-2021 period that he authored or co-authored all had a spike in citations due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Co-author of one of the first publications on a drug to treat Covid-19

“I went to work and do my residency at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Bichat Hospital in Paris, France in 2016. After completing my residency, I received a scholarship to study at the Mediterranean Institute for Infectious Diseases in Marseille, France. During my time as a PhD student, my research topic was respiratory and gastrointestinal infections in international travelers. With this topic, I had almost completed my work by the middle of my PhD program in France. Around that time, the Covid-19 epidemic broke out, so I started to shift my research focus to this disease.”

By the end of 2021, Mr. Thuan's articles had more than 7,000 citations and to date have had more than 7,500 citations - a milestone that many young researchers dream of, and even strive hard to achieve.

The number of citations is mainly related to articles published in the period 2020-2021, focusing on research articles on Covid-19 such as treatment, testing techniques, and virus culture.

Notably, the article “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of Covid‑19: Results of an open‑label non‑randomized clinical trial”, published in the journal Int J Antimicrob Agents in March 2020, currently has 5,279 citations on Google Scholar.

Hoang Van Thuan, lecturer of family medicine, Deputy Head of the strong research group on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases of Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy

Mr. Thuan added: “There are also articles where I am the main author, but in this article I am only one of the members participating in the research, a co-author, not the main author. The main author of this article is my teacher in Marseille, France.”

This article has many authors, mainly professors from the Research Institute where Mr. Thuan studied. However, Mr. Thuan is the only student of the Research Institute.

“In fact, everyone wants their articles to attract the attention of everyone, to be cited the most, thereby increasing their scientific research index. With this article, I and the authors are not too surprised by the high number of citations because if we look at the time of publication - March 2020, this is the first article published related to a drug to treat Covid-19. Since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, the number of articles published focusing on this pandemic has increased dramatically and can be said to be unprecedented. Previously, each year, scientists usually only published 2-3 major studies, but since Covid-19, studies have often focused on Covid-19. Everyone is focused on finding a drug to treat Covid-19 and often later studies will cite their previous studies. When studies on Covid-19 increase like that, the increase in my citations is not a bad thing. "That's surprising," said Mr. Thuan.

Focus on research on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases

In addition to this article, other articles he authored or co-authored related to Covid-19 in 2020-2021 also have high citations.

To date, Mr. Thuan has had a total of 85 articles, all of which have been published in prestigious international journals in the ISI category.

One of Mr. Thuan's reports on the topic he researched.

Mr. Thuan said that this is a joy, giving him more motivation to pursue further research.

“I feel lucky because I was able to join a research group with a lot of experience, work with famous professors as my supervisors, and receive attention and favor. During the process of working to publish scientific works, I also learned a lot from my teachers about knowledge, techniques, analysis, situation handling, etc. Now, even if I have 7,000 or up to 70,000 citations, my scientific research career still needs to continue. The more so, the more I have to continue researching, I cannot rely on the number of citations to be satisfied or think that I can stop,” Thuan confided.

Commemorative photo of the day Mr. Hoang Van Thuan and his wife graduated together in Marseille, France

In addition to teaching in class, Mr. Thuan always takes time to do research.

“I usually spend time on research in the evening or at noon. Actually, it is quite flexible, not rigid about when to do departmental work, when to do research, but whenever I have free time, I spend it on scientific research.”

The lecturer said that his research direction in the coming time will mainly focus on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, of which Covid-19 is just one of them. In particular, he will spend a lot of time orienting the strong research group of Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy.

“Currently, when the world is focusing on Covid-19, we temporarily forget about other infectious diseases, but in fact, diseases such as malaria, dengue fever,... also need to be researched.”

What Mr. Thuan is concerned about is that currently, the facilities and equipment to conduct such research in Vietnam are still limited and lacking, while in reality, it requires very specialized and expensive techniques such as virus culture, gene sequencing...

“When conditions are limited and there are no specialized testing techniques, my research team and I will focus on community-based research that is more suitable and feasible to conduct in Vietnam, such as side effects of the Covid-19 vaccine, parental consent for vaccination of children, and prolonged symptoms after Covid-19...”

To overcome this, Mr. Thuan plans to propose, through the school, to cooperate with foreign units to conduct in-depth research, learn, and accumulate new experience and knowledge.

According to Vietnamnet