Two top clinician scientists at the Bloorview Research Institute have been recognized as among the world’s leading experts in their fields according to Expertscape, an online database that assesses and ranks the expertise and contributions of physicians and medical institutions worldwide.

Dr. Darcy Fehlings, a senior clinician scientist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto, has been ranked among the top 0.1 percent out of 25,861 experts in cerebral palsy worldwide over the last 10 years (2011 to 2021). Additionally, she has placed among the top 0.1 percent among experts in chronic brain damage out of 27,942 published authors worldwide during the same period.

Dr. Evdokia Anagnostou, a senior clinician scientist and Canada Research Chair in Translational Therapeutics in Autism Spectrum Disorder, has also been ranked among the top 0.1 per cent of experts in autism out of 65,121 published authors worldwide. The scientist, who co-leads the institute’s Autism Research Centre at the Bloorview Research Institute and is a professor of pediatrics at University of Toronto’s Department of Pediatrics, has also placed in the 0.1 percent ranking of experts worldwide in the same period in the topics of autistic disorder, neurodevelopmental disorders, and pervasive child development disorders.

“I’d like to extend my heart-felt congratulations to Dr. Fehlings and Dr. Anagnostou on this well-deserved recognition,” says Dr. Tom Chau, vice president of research at Holland Bloorview and the director of the Bloorview Research Institute. “Their foundational work in advancing childhood disability research is putting Canada’s largest pediatric rehabilitation health centre on the global stage. But more importantly, their fierce pursuit to find new pathways of care through research is going to benefit even more families living with disabilities.”

How it works

Expertscape objectively ranks individuals and institutions by their expertise in more than 29,000 biomedical topics. The online database searches the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed journal database to find all the medical journals published on a certain topic in the past ten years and assigns a score to each article based on a number of factors such as the article’s year of publication (recent scores higher), the article’s type (guidelines and reviews are favoured over letters to the editor) and the journal in which the article appeared (some journals are ranked more favourably than others). Other considerations also include authorship (first versus second author) and the institution from which the article appeared. The database then tabulates the results by article, authors, institutions, cities, regions and countries.