Landmark Papers in Trauma and Acute Care Surgery

EAST consistently provides timely, evidence-based practice management guidelines (PMGs) aimed at answering common clinical questions. The primary sources behind these PMGs are often unknown or unread by many aspiring, young trauma surgeons. These landmark manuscripts provide the foundation for current Acute Care Surgery (ACS) practice and are essential reading for those seeking to understand how ACS is practiced.   

The EAST Landmark Paper resource includes heavily cited papers along with more recent defining papers that have changed the way patients are managed.  This resource serves as an extension of the ongoing development of EAST PMGs, literature reviews, and other online educational/CME content and is directly related to the Annual Scientific Meeting plenary session, “Papers That Changed Practice.”  The EAST Landmark Papers resource gives aspiring clinicians who are interested in the care of acute care surgery patients a solid foundation of defining papers from which they can interpret PMGs, literature reviews of newer material, and other educational content.  

From Paper to Landmark Paper:

For each sub-topic, a professional medical librarian first performed a comprehensive search using the Web of Science Database, limited to primary literature.  Reviews, editorials, and commentary were excluded.  Next, the titles were scanned and studies unrelated to acute care surgery were eliminated.  The remaining publications were then reviewed in full,  considering 1) number of citations; 2) number of citations per year for newer publications; 3) quality of scientific method; and 4) relevance to clinical practice.  Additional select publications not meeting initial search criteria were also considered on the merit of historical importance or lack of sufficient high-quality search results.  In the final round, a paper was designated “landmark” status by majority group consensus vote via Delphi method.”

From Paper to Landmark Paper