Jeroen Bax visits to St Petersburg, Russia

European Heart Journal (2018) 39, 3488–3498 doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehy612 Jeroen Bax visits to St Petersburg, Russia 2018). The ESC Gold Medal is the highest honour and international recognition of the outstanding achievements in cardiology and scientific excellence that the ESC can bestow on exceptional scientists for their contribution to the world cardiovascular medicine. The symposium itself consisted lectures by Prof Bax and his Russian colleagues from the Almazov Centre. Jeroen Bax presented two separate talks: one was titled as ‘Imaging in Sudden Cardiac Death’ and the second—‘Aortic stenosis—a problem of the valve or the ventricle?’. Then Prof Vladimir Fokin, head of radiology, spoke on ‘Modern imaging in cardiology: CT and MRI present and future’. Dr Darya Ryzhkova, chief of the PET centre, made a presentation ‘Cardiac nuclear imaging: state of the art and new trends’. And the closing lecture was given by Prof Mikhail Galagudza, Director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine in the Almazov Centre. He presented a report ‘Experimental and Translational Research in the Almazov Centre’. After a short break Prof Shlyakhto invited Prof Bax to meet with the Directors of Institutes and Departments to discuss the possibilities of research, scientific, and clinical collaboration. It was established that not only Russian Society of Cardiology and European Society of Cardiology have many mutual interests but the Almazov Centre and the Leiden University Medical Center as well. Cell and molecular biology, imaging, radiology and experimental and translational research were named among the most promising areas of joint work. The first steps on the way to successful collaboration were taken during the meeting in Saint-Petersburg. Ekaterina Uvarova RSC International Office +7(921)789-74-97 C The Author(s) 2018. For permissions, please email: . Published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. All rights reserved. V On 11 May 2018, Prof Jeroen J. Bax then President of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and Director of Non-invasive Imaging and Director of the Echo Laboratory in the Department of Cardiology at the Leiden University Medical Centre (Netherlands) payed a visit to the Almazov National Medical Research Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia and had a meeting with Prof Evgeny Shlyakhto, President of the Russian Society of Cardiology and Director-General of the Almazov Centre. That was not the first time Prof Bax met his Russian colleagues in the Almazov Centre: in 2016, he was a speaker at the IV Global Educational Forum ‘Russian Cardiovascular Days’ 21–23 April 2016 and visited the PET centre and other departments of radiology. This time the meeting began with a detailed tour around the research and clinical facilities of the Centre. Prof Shlyakhto and Prof Alexander Nedoshivin, Secretary-General, Russian Society of Cardiology and Scientific Secretary of the Almazov Centre, personally guided Jeroen Bax through the Preclinical Translational Research Centre, Institute of molecular biology and genetics and hybrid operating unit. Prof Bax became acquainted with the modern research base and sophisticated medical equipment at the Centre. During the visit cardiovascular surgeons were performing an intervention at the hybrid operating room, so everyone was able to observe the capacity of the facility at work. On that day a symposium on cardiovascular imaging was held in the Centre. When opening the session Prof Bax announced that Prof Shlyakhto will be awarded the Gold Medal of the European Society of Cardiology at the Annual ESC Congress in Munich (25–29 August 3489 CardioPulse doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehy613 The K-index and the hubs of science A simple way to overcome Hirsch’s h-index deficiencies is discussed by physicists from Brazil How to determine the most central scientists of a research area? Is it possible to determine if a scientist has opened up new research avenues or established new paradigms? In our immediate research areas, we usually know who are the creative contributors and scientific leaders. Qualitative indicators of scientific status include scientific prizes; however, such prizes are often awarded decades after researchers have achieved their main discoveries. In addition, the awardee is usually chosen among many similarly qualified peers; gender, nationality, scientific social network, and other biases might influence the final awarding decisions. The prime criteria for article acceptance by good scientific journals are originality and relevance to the advancement of a research field. Recognition comes in two steps: first, by the journal editor and referees; second, if the article is deemed relevant in one or another aspect by other researchers, it will be cited in the literature. Indeed, the traditional evaluation of the importance of a paper or researcher has been the citation counts. This tradition has been criticized due to the inertial dynamics of scientific citations: a wellcited paper has a higher chance of being cited again, a phenomenon known as the Matthew effect.1 Besides, the importance of receiving citations from papers that turn out being unimportant or weakly cited, which corresponds to a significant fraction of citations, is disputable.2 In 2005, physicist Jorge Hirsch proposed a simple index that lessens the weight that a few highly cited papers would have in the citation counts of researchers.3 The so-called Hirsch h-index is defined as follows. You rank your papers from the most cited one to the least cited one. Your h-index is h if you have h papers, each one with at least h citations. Therefore, the h-index measures both your citation impact and productivity, since h  N where N is the researcher’s number of papers. Hirsch’s contribution launched an avalanche of papers proposing new bibliometric indexes, most of them trying to overcome deficiencies presented by the h index, such as the g-index4 and the individual hI-index.5 By now, we have over one hundred of such indexes, as found in the handbook of Todeschini and Baccini.6 However, most of these new indexes have a substantial drawback: involved calculations, sometimes very lengthy, that cannot compete with the ease of calculation of the h-index. People prefer an index that is easy to obtain: a convoluted calculation, generating a metric that is marginally better than the hindex is not attractive. Recently, we have proposed a new index that is as easy to calculate as the h index and that overcomes several of its drawbacks.7 The Kindex is the number of articles citing a researcher that have at least K citations each. Notice that K does not refer directly to the number N of papers published by the researcher, as does the h-index; K is related to the quality of the citations received. Conflict of interest: none declared.  (...truncated)