2026 Poster Presentations
P173: MAPPING ACADEMIC COLLABORATION IN SKULL BASE SURGERY: THE SEKHAR NUMBER PROJECT
Ali A Alattar, MD; Sharath K Anand, MD; Madison L Remick, MD; Garret W Choby, MD; Eric W Wang, MD; Paul A Gardner, MD; Georgios A Zenonos, MD; Carl H Snyderman, MD; University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Introduction: The concept of academic distance, popularized through the Erdos number, has provided a unique lens for understanding patterns of scientific collaboration. Applying this framework to skull base surgery highlights the central role of Laligam N. Sekhar, one of the most prolific and influential contributors in the field. By constructing a coauthorship graph centered on Sekhar, we aimed to quantify his collaborative reach and situate North American Skull Base Society (NASBS) members within this academic network.
Methods: The NASBS member directory was used to identify contemporary skull base surgeons, whose name variants were then systematically queried in PubMed. Metadata from all indexed publications, spanning all years, were retrieved and parsed. Articles with excessive author counts or consortium attributions were excluded to prevent skewing of the network. Author and article records were stored in a cloud-hosted MongoDB database. Distributed processing across multiple R-based shell workers enabled efficient data ingestion at scale, while coauthorship edges were assigned weighted values based on the number of shared publications.
Results: Among 1,388 NASBS members identified, 1,357 (97.8%) could be connected within the Sekhar collaboration graph. A total of 107 authors were directly connected to Sekhar (Sekhar-1), with the most frequent coauthors including Chandranath Sen (35 publications), Ivo Janecka (27), Isaac Abecassis (15), and Dinesh Ramanathan (15). The majority of members (n=1,157, 83.5%) were at Sekhar-2 distance, while smaller subsets were found at distance 3 (n=91) and distance 4 (n=2). Only 32 members had no definable path within the network.
Interactive exploration of this dataset is available at: https://aalattar.shinyapps.io/sekhar.number. This interface allows users to search for individuals, visualize collaborative paths, and calculate Sekhar numbers dynamically.
Conclusion: The Sekhar Number Project demonstrates that nearly all active skull base surgeons in NASBS trace academic proximity to Laligam N. Sekhar within just two degrees of separation. This underscores both the collaborative density of the field and the enduring influence of a central pioneer whose scholarly reach continues to shape the discipline.
