Reply: Radioguided Surgery

REPLY: We would like to thank Dr. Mariani et al. (1) for their letter highlighting important papers on sentinel node imaging and intraoperative guidance. These papers are noteworthy scientific contributions that continue to have a significant impact on the clinical practice of nuclear medicine.

Despite their obvious scientific and clinical relevance, these papers were not included in the 60th anniversary supplement because they did not meet our criteria for choosing the limited number of publications that we could highlight in the supplement (see also introduction of the supplement). Since we had to select papers from several thousand publications, we were forced to use simple criteria and decided to choose the 3 most frequently cited original publications per decade plus 1 original publication per decade that was selected by 6 teams of editors (1 team per decade).

Like all approaches to quantifying and ranking “scientific impact,” our criteria for choosing manuscripts were to some extent arbitrary, and the results would have been somewhat different if we would, for example, have selected 2 papers per 5-year interval or the 25 most frequently cited papers for the whole 60-year period, etc. Nevertheless, we believe that our approach was reasonable because the overall number of citations of scientific papers has significantly increased over the years, and selecting the most frequently cited papers published over a period of 60 years would have biased against older publications.

Furthermore, the number of citations is a reasonable indicator of scientific impact but far from perfect. Therefore, we believe that also having the editors select 1 high-impact paper per decade is a reasonable compromise between a completely objective criterion (i.e., select the 4 most frequently cited papers per decade only) and a more subjective selection of 4 papers by the editors.

Since we fully agree with Mariani et al. on the importance of sentinel node imaging, we would like to thank them again for their letter, which nicely complements the papers in the supplement.

• © 2021 by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.