The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026

Academic output distribution

Hirsch index ("h-index") measures both productivity and citation impact. An h-index of N means the researcher has at least N papers each cited ≥N times. Among DEEPPLANE™'s academically-active cohort (n=129):

Highest-cited practitioners

Filtered to surgeons with ≥1 facelift-specific peer-reviewed publication (CrossRef-indexed). Ranked by facelift publication count, then h-index. Name-collision false positives (e.g. unrelated researchers sharing a name) are excluded by the relevance gate.

Surgeon experience distribution

Years of surgical experience across 627 listed surgeons with experience data (48% of active surgeons). Average: 21.7 years.

Source: surgeon-reported and admin-verified years of experience. Bucket '<5' includes residents and early-career specialists.

Social media presence

Combined Instagram following across 911 listed surgeons with a measured audience — a proxy for community reach and patient-facing authority.

Combined follower count double-counts overlapping audiences. It measures practitioner-community reach, not unique patient eyeballs. Source: Apify-licensed harvest + authorized IG Basic Display API.

Patient review aggregate

Google patient reviews across 956 listed surgeons. Excludes listings flagged as clinic or hospital aggregates (rather than individual surgeon ratings).

Source: Google Places enrichment, refreshed monthly. Only surgeons with at least one review are counted. Average rating is the mean of per-surgeon Google ratings, not a weighted aggregate.

Trust verification ladder

Every fact on a DEEPPLANE™ surgeon profile carries provenance. Multi-source agreement promotes facts up the verification ladder — patients see the verification tier explicitly on each profile.

What AI assistants tell patients

We put questions patients ask about a deep plane facelift to each assistant on a fixed schedule and record the sites every answer cites. Each assistant is asked the kinds of question it answers, so the mix of questions differs from one assistant to another and the rows are not a like-for-like contest. A surgeon named in the question itself is not counted as one the assistant named. Read November 2, 2026, over the last 35 days.

A surgeon counts only when an answer gives a full name that matches our directory. A name we cannot match is left out, never counted as unverified. Updated monthly.