how many medical research papers are published every day

Advertisement

The growth of scientific publications in 2020: a bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications, keywords, and citations in orthopaedic surgery

• Published: 01 August 2021
• Volume 45 , pages 1905–1910, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Jing Sun 1 ,
• Andreas F. Mavrogenis 2 &
• Marius M. Scarlat 3  

3728 Accesses

10 Citations

Explore all metrics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Science has grown since the mid-1600’s. Specifically, three essential growth phases in the development of science have been identified; less than 1% up to the middle of the eighteenth century, to 2% to 3% up to the period between the two world wars, and 8% to 9% to 2010 [ 1 ]. Growth in science is driven by the publication of novel ideas and experiments, most usually in peer-reviewed journals. Currently, the number of published papers in different journals, social and mass media is increasing exponentially and the growth rates are significantly higher every decade.

Surgeons perform operations, complete hospital paperwork and additionally do research to improve clinical practice and the well-being of their patients, as well as to promote their own career, personal reputation, income and institutional/university position. Therefore, publication activity is time consuming and leads to overwhelming anxiety, and may be seen as a burden by young doctors who would enjoy performing surgery more. In orthopaedics, surgeons need to refocus some of their time and energies to communication and constructive research.

The pandemic time was a special period when the medical administration, governments, health-care payers were overwhelmed by the public medicine priorities and therefore the “unnecessary” surgery or medical care was postponed.

By observation of the activity of research processing within medical journals in 2020, we realised that the number of submissions increased dramatically. The media played a key role in promoting public health and influencing debate regarding health issues. Mass media coverage of COVID-19 pandemic has been exceptional with more than 180,000 articles published each day in 70 languages from March 8 to April 8, 2020. One may well wonder if this massive media attention ever happen in the past and if it has been finally proven to be beneficial or even just appropriate [ 2 ].

Before 2020, International Orthopaedics was receiving less than 3000 papers per year for consideration; approximately 400 were published. The submissions number rose to 3600 papers in 2020. A large number of papers analysed the new sanitary condition as perceived in orthopaedic surgery and traumatology. Other papers were retrospective clinical studies based on register data or on radiologic evidence, studies that did not require the physical presence of the patients.

This unusual rise in the volume of submissions encouraged us to perform this study measuring the dynamic and growth of the orthopaedic literature in 2020 based on the published papers, their specific keywords and citations.

Material and methods

Production analysis of orthopaedic literature during the pandemic.

A database-based literature search was done on June 7, 2021. We observed and ran the PubMed and Embase search engines. Only journal articles were included. Recentfour year publications were retrieved and obtained from the databases, and the metadata were pooled and merged together by removing the duplicates using the software “Endnote 20” (Camelot UK Bidco Limited—Clarivate, UK). The results were sorted by publication year, and the number of the papers was counted for analysis.

Characteristics and thematic analysis of orthopaedic literature during the pandemic

The Web of Science (WOS; Clarivate Analytics, Philadelphia, USA) platform (database: SCI expanded) was adopted to perform the literature search on June 7, 2021. Eighty two (82) journal titles under the category “orthopedics” and “orthopaedics” were selected from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for the year 2019, [ 3 ] and were used as the searching terms by limiting to publication name. The journal titles using “OR” operator were placed in the searching window of platform with the index selecting “Publication Name”, and then all articles from the 82 journals were identified.

The papers were included if (i) they were published in the 82 orthopaedic journals mentioned above and (ii) they were published from 2020 to date. Editorials, meeting abstracts, letters, corrections, proceedings, biographical productions, book reviews, news, retraction announcements, and reprints were excluded from the present analysis.

After literature retrieval, the metadata was downloaded and analysed by using “biblioshiny” that is an application that provides a web-interface of R package (Bibliometrix 3.1, University of Naples Federico II, Via Cintia, I-80126, Naples, Italy). It performs science mapping analysis using the main functions of the bibliometrix package, and supports scholars in easy use of the main features of bibliometrix. The data was imported to the software and converted to frame collection, and then the converted metadata was analysed in terms of documents, sources and conceptual structure to reveal the trends of topics. The keywords used were selected in the MeSH thesaurus. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the National Library of Medicine controlled vocabulary used for indexing articles for PubMed. Subgroup analyses on “pandemics”, “sports and arthroscopy”, “arthritis”, “shoulder and elbow”, and “Spine” were performed by the same method.

Rise in production of orthopaedic literature

A total of 68,311 orthopaedic papers were retrieved in PubMed for the years 2017 (15,528 papers), 2018 (16,159 papers), 2019 (17,371 papers), and 2020 (19,253 papers). A total of 133,765 orthopaedic papers were retrieved in Embase for the years 2017 (29,001 papers), 2018 (30,167 papers), 2019 (33,401 papers), and 2020 (41,196 papers). The data from the two databases were merged by removing duplicates ( n  = 39,757); this returned 35,846 papers related to orthopaedics in 2017, 36,983 papers in 2018, 40,234 papers in 2019, and 49,256 papers in 2020. The growth rate of 2018 is 3.1%; it is 8.8% for 2019 and 22.4% for 2020. There is a significant rise in orthopaedic publications in 2020 (Fig.  1 ).

Number of papers and growth rate of orthopaedic publications from 2017 to 2020

Characteristics of the orthopaedic publications from 2020 to date

A total of 22,399 articles were retrieved in WOS from 2020 to date, including 19,008 original articles and 2391 reviews. The average citations per documents were 0.9894. The number of references cited by these publications was 354,775, and the documents contained 32,316 keywords as defined by the authors.

Global citations measure the number of citations a document has received from documents included in the entire database (all disciplines). The most global cited document with 129 cites was the paper entitled “Physiotherapy management for COVID-19 in the acute hospital setting: clinical practice recommendations” published in the Journal of Physiotherapy , and the top ten most global cited documents ranged from 129 to 43 citations (Table 1 ).

Local citations measure the number of citations a document has received from papers included in the analysed collection (same discipline). The most local cited document with 31 cites was the paper entitled “Lateral extra-articular tenodesis reduces failure of hamstring tendon autograft anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction: two year outcomes from the STABILITY study randomized clinical trial” published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine , and the top ten most local cited documents ranged from 31 to 16 citations (Table 2 ).

Among the 82 journals, the one that contributed most to the orthopaedic literature was the BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders. The number of publications for the top 20 most relevant journals ranged from 1230 to 388 (Table 3 ). The most local cited source was the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery . The local citations of the top 20 journals ranged from 34,669 to 5081 (Table 4 ).

Thematic trend of orthopaedic publications from 2020 to date

A tree map was applied to analyse the main topics according to the paper counts. The topics discussed the most were total knee arthroplasty ( n  = 926 papers, 9%), osteoarthritis ( n  = 745 papers, 7%), and knee ( n  = 693 papers, 7%) (Fig.  2 ).

Tree map of 30 prominent themes with orthopaedic papers counts and percentage

To detect the thematic trend of orthopaedic publications, we applied thematic map to position the importance and development of the research themes based on density and centrality. The themes “Covid-19”, “hip arthroscopy”, and “femoroacetabular impingement” were relatively new themes that are expected to be emerging or declining (Fig.  2 ). The themes “spine”, “low back pain”, “osteoarthritis”, “knee”, and “MRI” were hot and essential. The themes “shoulder”, “arthroscopy”, “osteoporosis”, “hip fracture”, and “total knee/hip arthroplasty” were basic and transversal themes, signifying that more papers on these topics are currently published. Last, the themes “infection” and “anterior cruciate ligament” were highly developed but may be isolated (Fig.  3 ).

Thematic map of the trends in orthopaedic publications. The centrality measures the importance, and the density measures the development. Four zones represent different trends. The upper left zone refers to topics with high density but low centrality, which means the themes may highly developed but isolated. The upper right zone is with high density and centrality, which means the themes are developed and essential (motor theme). The lower left zone is with low density and low centrality, which refers to the emerging or declining themes. The lower right zone with low density but high centrality represents the basic and transversal theme

For subgroup analysis, the top three keywords for “pandemic” ( n  = 382 papers) were “covid-19” (28%), “pandemic” (8%), and “coronavirus” (7%); in this topic, “telemedicine” (3%) attracted more attention during pandemic. For “sports and arthroscope” ( n  = 1082 papers), the top three keywords were “knee” (6%), “anterior cruciate ligament” (5%), and “sports” (4%). For “arthritis” ( n  = 1071 papers), the top three keywords were “osteoarthritis” (11%), “rheumatoid arthritis” (7%), and “total knee arthroplasty” (6%). For “spine” ( n  = 2210 papers), the top three keywords were “spine” (11%), “spine surgery” (7%), and “osteoporosis” (5%). For “shoulder and elbow” ( n  = 2490 papers), the top three keywords were “shoulder” (14%), “elbow” (5%), and “rotator cuff” (5%).

Keywords-based research reveals keywords that have generated the most traffic to sites in a specific publications market. This information may be used to build keyword groups, to find trending topics, and to point out specific fields of interest. The growth of the overall volume of publications is an objective fact that could not be ignored. The published papers discuss basically the same topics observed in the previous two years. New terms of interest such as viral infection or COVID were observed but they were not found responsible for such an impressive rise of the number of publications in 2020. The research items in orthopaedics were sensibly the same as in the recent past; however the volume of papers published for the same MeSH terms had a significant growth in number. Unfortunately, there is no application to control for the quality of the published papers; only the number of citations may be considered for evaluating the utility of a publication and this has to be considered in the following years.

The present study does not provide a reasonable explanation for the substantial growth of orthopaedic publications in 2020. Also, we cannot predict if this growth is sustainable or only punctual, and/or if it was generated or related to the decrease of the scheduled surgical operations in the specific time frame of the pandemic. We could presume that the increased number of published papers can be explained by the fact that the surgeons were for a long time away from the operating theaters, as the number of scheduled operations was strongly decreased secondary to the pandemic. However, meanwhile the academic pressure for academic rise, prestige and promotion was constant as the doctors were still working for achieving academic status and progressing in their professional career and status. A surgeon’s main activity is to perform surgery and care. However, a big number of publications in the years 2017 to 2020 were related to alternative methods for managing orthopaedic conditions, medical treatments, infiltrations, physical therapy, patient education, diet, and so many others [ 4 , 5 , 6 ].

Many of the published papers in 2020 describe a decrease in the surgical management of different bone and joint conditions during the pandemic, resulting eventually in a loose of quality and volume of care in different services. This could eventually lead to a change in the overall number of papers published in each journal in the future. Because the research begins and ends to the patients, we hope but we are not very positive that this growth in publications might eventually lead to a change in clinical practice.

Bornmann L, Mutz R (2015) Growth rates of modern science: a bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references. JASIST 66:2215–2222. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23329

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Romanò CL, Drago L, Del Sel H, Johari A, Lob G, Mavrogenis AF, Benzakour T (2020) World Association against Infection in Orthopedics and Trauma (WAIOT) Study Group On Bone And Joint Infection Definitions Loud and silent epidemics in the third millennium: tuning-up the volume. Int Orthop. 44(6):1019–1022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-020-04608-8

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Fang D, Fan M, Jia Z (2016) Fifty top-cited fracture articles from China: a systematic review and bibliometric analysis. J Orthop Surg Res 11(1):1–8

Article   Google Scholar  

Bezuglov EN, Tikhonova AA, Chubarovskiy PV, Repetyuk AD, Khaitin VY, Lazarev AM, Usmanova EM (2020) Conservative treatment of Osgood-Schlatter disease among young professional soccer players. Int Orthop 44(9):1737–1743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-020-04572-3

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Shanmugasundaram S, Vaish A, Chavada V, Murrell WD, Vaishya R (2021) Assessment of safety and efficacy of intra-articular injection of stromal vascular fraction for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis-a systematic review. Int Orthop 45(3):615–625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-020-04926-x

Gou PG, Zhao ZH, Zhou JM, Ren LH, Wang XY, Mu YF, Wang YG, Chang F, Xue Y (2021) Vertebral collapse prevented following teriparatide treatment in postmenopausal Kummell’s disease patients with severe osteoporosis. Orthop Surg 13(2):506–516. https://doi.org/10.1111/os.12959

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Orthopaedic Surgery, No. 406, Jie Fang Nan Road, Hexi District, Tianjin, 300050, People’s Republic of China

First Department of Orthopaedics, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Andreas F. Mavrogenis

Groupe ELSAN, Clinique St. Michel, Av. Orient, 83100, Toulon, France

Marius M. Scarlat

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marius M. Scarlat .

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Sun, J., Mavrogenis, A.F. & Scarlat, M.M. The growth of scientific publications in 2020: a bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications, keywords, and citations in orthopaedic surgery . International Orthopaedics (SICOT) 45 , 1905–1910 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-021-05171-6

Download citation

Published : 01 August 2021

Issue Date : August 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-021-05171-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Annual articles published in scientific and technical journals per million people

What you should know about this indicator, how does the producer of this data describe this data, sources and processing, this data is based on the following sources, world bank – world development indicators, united nations – world population prospects, how we process data at our world in data.

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Reuse this work

• All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
• All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

How to cite this data

In-line citation If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Full citation

Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone.

Help us do this work by making a donation.

• Introduction
• Article Information

Graphs show number of views for all articles (A) and research articles only (B) and number of articles published for all articles (C) and research articles only (D) in the 3 journals over the same period in 2019 and 2020.

Box plots show medians (lines within boxes) and interquartile ranges (bottoms and tops of boxes) of articles published in the 3 journals. Scale is limited to 500 000 to better show boxes. Circles denote outliers. Whiskers denote values within 1.5 times the interquartile range from the upper or lower quartile.

See More About

Sign up for emails based on your interests, select your interests.

Customize your JAMA Network experience by selecting one or more topics from the list below.

• Academic Medicine
• Acid Base, Electrolytes, Fluids
• Allergy and Clinical Immunology
• American Indian or Alaska Natives
• Anesthesiology
• Anticoagulation
• Art and Images in Psychiatry
• Artificial Intelligence
• Assisted Reproduction
• Bleeding and Transfusion
• Caring for the Critically Ill Patient
• Challenges in Clinical Electrocardiography
• Climate and Health
• Climate Change
• Clinical Challenge
• Clinical Decision Support
• Clinical Implications of Basic Neuroscience
• Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Consensus Statements
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Critical Care Medicine
• Cultural Competency
• Dental Medicine
• Dermatology
• Diabetes and Endocrinology
• Diagnostic Test Interpretation
• Drug Development
• Electronic Health Records
• Emergency Medicine
• End of Life, Hospice, Palliative Care
• Environmental Health
• Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
• Facial Plastic Surgery
• Gastroenterology and Hepatology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Genomics and Precision Health
• Global Health
• Guide to Statistics and Methods
• Hair Disorders
• Health Care Delivery Models
• Health Care Economics, Insurance, Payment
• Health Care Quality
• Health Care Reform
• Health Care Safety
• Health Care Workforce
• Health Disparities
• Health Inequities
• Health Policy
• Health Systems Science
• History of Medicine
• Hypertension
• Images in Neurology
• Implementation Science
• Infectious Diseases
• Innovations in Health Care Delivery
• JAMA Infographic
• Law and Medicine
• Leading Change
• Less is More
• LGBTQIA Medicine
• Lifestyle Behaviors
• Medical Coding
• Medical Devices and Equipment
• Medical Education
• Medical Education and Training
• Medical Journals and Publishing
• Mobile Health and Telemedicine
• Narrative Medicine
• Neuroscience and Psychiatry
• Notable Notes
• Nutrition, Obesity, Exercise
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Occupational Health
• Ophthalmology
• Orthopedics
• Otolaryngology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Care
• Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
• Patient Care
• Patient Information
• Performance Improvement
• Performance Measures
• Perioperative Care and Consultation
• Pharmacoeconomics
• Pharmacoepidemiology
• Pharmacogenetics
• Pharmacy and Clinical Pharmacology
• Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
• Physical Therapy
• Physician Leadership
• Population Health
• Primary Care
• Professional Well-being
• Professionalism
• Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
• Public Health
• Pulmonary Medicine
• Regulatory Agencies
• Reproductive Health
• Research, Methods, Statistics
• Resuscitation
• Rheumatology
• Risk Management
• Scientific Discovery and the Future of Medicine
• Shared Decision Making and Communication
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports Medicine
• Stem Cell Transplantation
• Substance Use and Addiction Medicine
• Surgical Innovation
• Surgical Pearls
• Teachable Moment
• Technology and Finance
• The Art of JAMA
• The Arts and Medicine
• The Rational Clinical Examination
• Tobacco and e-Cigarettes
• Translational Medicine
• Trauma and Injury
• Treatment Adherence
• Ultrasonography
• Users' Guide to the Medical Literature
• Vaccination
• Venous Thromboembolism
• Veterans Health
• Women's Health
• Workflow and Process
• Wound Care, Infection, Healing

Get the latest research based on your areas of interest.

Others also liked.

• Download PDF
• X Facebook More LinkedIn

Giustini AJ , Schroeder AR , Axelrod DM. Trends in Views of Articles Published in 3 Leading Medical Journals During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(4):e216459. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.6459

Manage citations:

© 2024

• Permissions

Trends in Views of Articles Published in 3 Leading Medical Journals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• 1 Department of Anesthesiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
• 2 Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the peer review, publication, and readership of scientific articles. 1 - 3 The scientific community has voiced concern that the focus on COVID-19 adversely affects dissemination of research into other diseases. 4 , 5 Recently, the number of article views has been recognized as a metric for article impact. 6 In this study, we sought to assess the trends in views of articles published in 3 leading medical journals during the pandemic.

Because no patients were involved in this study (only analysis of journal article reads), we did not obtain institutional review board approval or informed consent. To assess changes in views of medical scientific articles, in this cross-sectional study we examined full and PDF views of articles published by 3 widely read, English-language, general medical journals— JAMA , The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ), and BMJ —from January to July of 2019 and 2020. All articles other than journal mastheads were included in data collection. Article types included research articles, educational articles, opinion, reviews, letters, erratum, and scientific news.

Views data were acquired by inspecting the metrics information for each article provided by the journal websites with the Scrapy web scraping and website parsing package version 2.3.0 (Scrapy) for Python statistical software version 3.8.3 (Python Software Foundation) with the Spyder open-source interface version 4.1.4. We first determined whether articles were COVID-19 focused and original research (yes or no). COVID-19–focused articles were defined as those that referenced COVID-19 (or a synonymous term) in the title, or whose content was judged by the primary author (A.J.G.) to be primarily pandemic related. Unclear article categorization was decided in consensus by all 3 authors. Articles were categorized as original research if they were original research articles, including meta-analyses.

We compared the views of non–COVID-19 original research articles from March 2020 (when COVID-19 attention began to mount) to July 2020 with the same period in 2019. Because of journal variation in metric reporting methods, we standardized view accrual time by summing views through the end of the month following the date of issue. Differences in median views of the 457 relevant articles were assessed with the Wilcoxon rank-sum test using R statistical software version 4.0.2 with the RStudio version 1.3.1073 interface (both from R Project for Statistical Computing). We then performed subgroup analyses on the 3 journals with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, with significance set at 2-tailed P  = .017. Data analysis was performed from October to December 2020.

In total, the number of views for 7528 articles were collected: 4059 articles from BMJ , 2079 from JAMA , and 1390 from NEJM . In March to July of 2020, the median (interquartile range) number of views of COVID-19 original research articles was 117 341.5 (51 114-294 8595.5) views, and the median (interquartile range) number of views of non–COVID-19 original research articles was 10 171 (5848-20 406) views. In March to July 2019, there were 258 non–COVID-19 research articles published (68 in BMJ , 97 in JAMA , and 93 in NEJM ), compared with 199 non–COVID-19 original research articles published in March to July 2020 (49 in BMJ , 70 in JAMA , and 80 in NEJM ), a decrease of 23%. Overall readership of articles between March to July 2019 and March to July 2020 increased by 557%, whereas the total number of articles published per month remained constant ( Figure 1 ). Although the total number of non–COVID-19 original research articles decreased from 2019 to 2020 ( Figure 1 B and 1 D), the median number of views of each article was not substantially different between March to July of 2019 and March to July 2020 ( Figure 2 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased overall article views for major medical journals in 2020, with unprecedented views per article for COVID-19–related publications. Although the total number of published original non–COVID-19 research articles decreased during the pandemic in these 3 journals, the number of views per article has remained constant, implying that individual non–COVID-19 original research articles are receiving similar attention as before the pandemic. The pandemic may detrimentally affect the broader evidence base because fewer non–COVID-19 research articles have been published in the 3 journals studied. This work begins to address the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected attention to other diseases in the medical literature. These findings may be limited by different approaches to page view reporting and variable numbers of articles published between the studied journals.

Accepted for Publication: February 26, 2021.

Published: April 1, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.6459

Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License . © 2021 Giustini AJ et al. JAMA Network Open .

Corresponding Author: Andrew J. Giustini, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, 300 Pasteur Dr, Rm H3580, MC 5640, Stanford, CA 94305 ( [email protected] ).

Author Contributions: Dr Giustini had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Concept and design: All authors.

Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: Giustini, Axelrod.

Drafting of the manuscript: Giustini, Axelrod.

Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.

Statistical analysis: Giustini.

Administrative, technical, or material support: Axelrod.

Supervision: Axelrod.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

• Register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles
• Access PDFs of free articles
• Manage your interests
• Save searches and receive search alerts

Nearly 80 systematic reviews were published each day: Observational study on trends in epidemiology and reporting over the years 2000-2019

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Health Services Research, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 2 Department of Health Services Research, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
• 3 Institute for Research in Operative Medicine, Faculty of Health, School of Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, Cologne, Germany; Department of Health Care Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
• 4 Institute for Research in Operative Medicine, Faculty of Health, School of Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, Cologne, Germany.
• PMID: 34091022
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.05.022

Background: Systematic reviews (SRs) are useful tools in synthesising the available evidence, but high numbers of overlapping SRs are also discussed in the context of research waste. Although it is often claimed that the number of SRs being published is increasing steadily, there are no precise data on that. We aimed to assess trends in the epidemiology and reporting of published SRs over the last 20 years.

Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted to identify potentially eligible SRs indexed in PubMed from 2000 to 2019. From all 572,871 records retrieved, we drew a simple random sample of 4,000. The PRISMA-P definition of SRs was applied to full texts and only SRs published in English were included. Characteristics were extracted by one reviewer, with a 20% sample verified by a second person.

Results: A total of 1,132 SRs published in 710 different journals were included. The estimated number of SRs indexed in 2000 was 1,432 (95% CI: 547-2,317), 5,013 (95% CI: 3,375-6,650) in 2010 and 29,073 (95% CI: 25,445-32,702) in 2019. Transparent reporting of key items increased over the years. About 7 out of 10 named their article a SR (2000-2004: 41.9% and 2015-2019: 74.4%). In 2000-2004, 32.3% of SRs were based in the UK (0% in China), in 2015-2019 24.0% were from China and 10.8% from the UK. Nearly all articles from China (94.9%) conducted a meta-analysis (overall: 58.9%). Cochrane reviews (n = 84; 7.4%) less often imposed language restrictions, but often did not report the number of records and full texts screened and did not name their article a SR (22.6% vs. 73.4%).

Conclusions: We observed a more than 20-fold increase in the number of SRs indexed over the last 20 years. In 2019, this is equivalent to 80 SRs per day. Over time, SRs got more diverse in respect to journals, type of review, and country of corresponding authors. The high proportion of meta-analyses from China needs further investigation.

Study registration: Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/pxjrv/).

Keywords: Cochrane Review; Evidence-Based Practice; Meta-Analysis; Reporting; Systematic Review; Trends.

Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publication types

• Observational Study
• Biomedical Research / statistics & numerical data*
• Epidemiologic Studies*
• Forecasting
• Meta-Analysis as Topic*
• Publications / statistics & numerical data*
• Publications / trends*
• Research Report / trends*
• Retrospective Studies
• Systematic Reviews as Topic*

SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

Publications output: u.s. trends and international comparisons.

• Report PDF (816 KB)
• Report - All Formats .ZIP (4.0 MB)
• Supplemental Materials - All Formats .ZIP (25.0 MB)
• MORE DOWNLOADS OPTIONS
• Share on X/Twitter
• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Send as Email

Executive Summary

Key takeaways:

• Global research output, as measured by peer-reviewed science and engineering (S&E) journal articles and conference papers, grew about 4% annually over the last 10 years.
• China’s rate of research output has grown almost twice as fast as the world’s annual average for the last 10 years, while the output of the United States and European Union (EU) has grown at less than half the world’s annual growth rate.
• Research papers from United States and EU countries continue to have the most impact; however, China has shown a rapid increase in producing impactful publications, as measured by references to journal articles and conference papers.
• Specialization in scientific fields differs among countries, with the United States, the EU, and Japan more specialized in health sciences and China and India more specialized in engineering, as measured by journal articles and conference papers.
• International collaborations have increased over the last 10 years.

Data on articles in peer-reviewed S&E journals and conference papers reflect the rapidly expanding volume of research activity and the new knowledge it generates, the growing involvement and scientific capabilities of middle-income countries, and the expanding research ecosystem demonstrated through international collaborations. A primary method of disseminating research is through publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. This report utilizes data from the Scopus database of global S&E publications and finds that worldwide S&E publication output continues to grow on average at nearly 4% per year; from 2008 to 2018, output grew from 1.8 million to 2.6 million articles. In 2018, China (with a share of 21%) and the United States (with a share of 17%) were the largest producers. As a group, the EU countries (with a share of 24%) produced more S&E articles than China or the United States.

The international nature of research continues to grow. International collaborations increased in 2018 with slightly more than one out of five articles having coauthors from multiple countries. The collaboration base has grown as countries that were small producers of scientific publications 10 to 20 years ago have accelerated their global publication output.

Scientific impact, as measured by highly cited publications, shows the United States is among the leading countries with close to twice as many citations as would be expected given U.S. production levels. The U.S. impact in S&E publications has remained steady over the last 20 years.

The articles published from the United States and the EU countries exhibit relatively more specialization and impact in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, biological and biomedical sciences, geosciences, health sciences, psychology, and social sciences. The EU countries also show specialization and impact in natural resources and conservation as well as mathematics and statistics. China’s publications show the most specialization and impact in the fields of agricultural sciences, chemistry, computer and information sciences, engineering, materials science, natural resources and conservation, and physics.

Related Content

share this!

April 27, 2022

Millions of research papers are published in a year. How do scientists keep up?

by Eva Botkin-Kowacki, Northeastern University

If you want to be a scientist, you're going to have to do a lot of reading.

Science is an endeavor focused on building and sharing knowledge. Researchers publish papers detailing their discoveries, breakthroughs, and innovations in order to share those revelations with colleagues. And there are millions of scientific papers each year.

Keeping up with the latest developments in their field is a challenge for researchers at all points of their careers, but it especially affects early-career scientists, as they also have to read the many papers that represent the foundation of their field.

"It's impossible to read everything. Absolutely impossible," Ajay Satpute, director of the Affective and Brain Science Lab and an assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern. "And if you don't know everything that has happened in the field, there's a real chance of reinventing the wheel over and over and over again." The challenge, he says, is to figure out how to train the next generation of scientists economically, balancing the need to read all the seminal papers with training them as researchers in their own right.

That task is only getting more difficult, says Alessia Iancarelli, a Ph.D student studying affective and social psychology in Satpute's lab. "The volume of published literature just keeps increasing," she says. "How are scientists able to develop their scholarship in a field given this huge amount of literature?" They have to pick and choose what to read.

But common approaches to that prioritization, Iancarelli says, can incorporate biases and leave out crucial corners of the field. So Iancarelli, Satpute and colleagues developed a machine learning approach to find a better—and less biased—way to make a reading list. Their results, which were published last week in the journal PLOS One , also help reduce gender bias.

"There really is a problem about how we develop scholarship," Satpute says. Right now, scientists will often use a search tool like Google Scholar on a topic and start from there, he says. "Or, if you're lucky, you'll get a wonderful instructor and have a great syllabus. But that's going to be basically the field through that person's eyes. And so I think that this really fills a niche that might help create balance and cross-disciplinary scholarship without necessarily having access to a wonderful instructor, because not everyone gets that."

The problem with something like Google Scholar, Iancarelli explains, is that it will give you the most popular papers in a field, measured by how many other papers have cited them. If there are subsets of that field that aren't as popular but are still relevant, the important papers on those topics might get missed with such a search.

Take, for example, the topic of aggression (which is the subject the researchers focused on to develop their algorithm). Media and video games are a particularly hot topic in aggression research, Iancarelli says, and therefore there are a lot more papers on that subset of the field than on other topics, such as the role of testosterone, and social aggression.

So Iancarelli decided to group papers on the topic of aggression into communities. Using citation network analysis, she identified 15 research communities on aggression. Rather than looking at the raw number of times a paper has been cited in another research paper , the algorithm determines a community of papers that tend to cite each other or the same core set of papers. The largest communities it revealed were media and video games, stress, traits and aggression, rumination and displaced aggression, the role of testosterone, and social aggression. But there were also some surprises, such as a smaller community of research papers focused on aggression and horses.

"If you use community detection, then you get this really rich, granular look at the aggression field," Satpute says. "You have sort of a bird's-eye-view of the entire field rather than [it appearing that] the field of aggression is basically media, video games, and violence."

In addition to diversifying the topics featured by using this community approach, the researchers also found that the percentage of articles with women first authors dubbed influential by the algorithm doubled in comparison to when they focused only on total citation counts. (Iancarelli adds there might be some biases baked into that result, as the team couldn't ask the authors directly about their gender identity and instead had to rely on assumptions based on the author's name, picture, and any pronouns used to refer to them.)

The team has released the code behind this algorithm so that others can use it and replicate their citation network analysis approach in other fields of research.

For Iancarelli, there's another motivation: "I would love to use this work to create a syllabus and teach my own course on human aggression. I would really love to base the syllabus on the most relevant papers from each different community to give a true general view of the human aggression field."

Journal information: PLoS ONE

Provided by Northeastern University

Explore further

Feedback to editors

The importance of the paradise fish in evolutionary and behavioral genetics research

8 hours ago

A cracking discovery: Eggshell waste can recover rare earth elements needed for green energy

Study suggests germanium isotope really does have an 11-day half-life

10 hours ago

Fighting fires from space in record time: How AI could prevent a repeat of Australia's devastating wildfires

Atomizer of history: How perfume research has shaped a century of scientific innovation

Elephant seal outbreak marks first transnational spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza in mammals

Flapping frequency of birds, insects, bats and whales predicted with just body mass and wing area

11 hours ago

Study finds US Islamist extremist co-offenders form close-knit groups driven by mutual contacts, homophily effects

Study finds simple headlines attract more online news readers

Researchers solve 2,000-year-old mystery of the destructive shipworm

12 hours ago

Relevant PhysicsForums posts

Today's fusion music: t square, cassiopeia, rei & kanade sato.

7 hours ago

What's The Opposite Of Subtlety?

Most underrated rock drummer.

13 hours ago

Cover songs versus the original track, which ones are better?

Jun 4, 2024

Biographies, history, personal accounts

Bach, bach, and more bach please.

More from Art, Music, History, and Linguistics

Related Stories

Prize winning topics found to deliver more science papers and citations than non-prize-winning topics

Oct 6, 2021

Women are undercited and men are overcited in communication

Aug 6, 2021

Women more likely to enjoy aggression in porn: study

Feb 11, 2022

Analysis suggests China has passed US on one research measure

Mar 8, 2022

Successful research papers cite young references

Apr 15, 2019

Seattle AI lab's free search engine aims to accelerate scientific breakthroughs

Oct 31, 2019

Recommended for you

Saturday Citations: The sound of music, sneaky birds, better training for LLMs. Plus: Diversity improves research

Jun 1, 2024

Researchers identify the 18 World War II executed civilians of Adele, Rethymnon, using ancient DNA analysis

May 27, 2024

Saturday Citations: The cheapness horizon of electric batteries; the battle-worthiness of ancient armor; scared animals

May 25, 2024

Saturday Citations: Mediterranean diet racks up more points; persistent quantum coherence; vegan dogs

May 18, 2024

First-generation medical students face unique challenges and need more targeted support, say researchers

May 16, 2024

Saturday Citations: Dietary habits of humans; dietary habits of supermassive black holes; saving endangered bilbies

May 11, 2024

Let us know if there is a problem with our content

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys.org in any form.

Newsletter sign up

Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

More information Privacy policy

Donate and enjoy an ad-free experience

We keep our content available to everyone. Consider supporting Science X's mission by getting a premium account.

E-mail newsletter

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Chin J Cancer Res
• v.26(1); 2014 Feb

Build infrastructure in publishing scientific journals to benefit medical scientists

Xiyao zhong.

There is urgent need for medical journals to optimize their publishing processes and strategies to satisfy the huge need for medical scientists to publish their articles, and then obtain better prestige and impact in scientific and research community. These strategies include optimizing the process of peer-review, utilizing open-access publishing models actively, finding ways of saving costs and getting revenue, smartly dealing with research fraud or misconduct, maintaining sound relationship with pharmaceutical companies, and managing to provide relevant and useful information for clinical practitioners and researchers. Scientists, publishers, societies and organizations need to work together to publish internationally renowned medical journals.

Introduction

Medical journals began at the end of 18th century, and specialist medical journals came up at the beginning of 20th century. The prosperity of medical journals came about a decade ago. Most of the landmark studies that have changed clinical medicine have been published on journals. Over the years, the number of active, peer-reviewed journals has expanded to approximately 28,000, collectively publishing more than 1.8 million articles every year. US President Barack Obama’s administration declared that government-funded research papers should be made freely available within 12 months of publication.

Optimize the process of peer review

Thousands of researchers worldwide need to publish their articles and not all of them can do so in the highest ranked journals. International, scientific, scholarly peer-reviewed journals mean a lot to the scientific community and society. These journals usually check the scientific quality, relevance and interest to readers, findings that may or may not advance science. As a reader, no one wants to spend time reading vast quantities of low quality research and would be willing to pay for someone to do the filtering for quality, relevance and novelty that traditional journal editors have been doing. The coming of evidence-informed practice highlights the desirability of timely access to research evidence. Even large volume of information is available in many forms, traditional peer-reviewed journals still are the main information source for clinical practitioners and researchers ( 1 , 2 ).

Peer review is the process during which peers of the authors being asked to review the studies before publication. It is the peer-review process which guarantees the scientific quality of medical journals. Journals should have a highly productive and responsive peer-review system.

Reviewers and editorial members are usually volunteers who contribute to the peer-review process without reimbursement. They normally are doctors and researchers engaged in research and clinical practice of oncology. They are selected for their expertise related to the subject of an article, which makes the peer-review process works well. Reviewers and editorial members make great contributions to journals with rigorous peer review in exchange for personal network and the prestige within their academic communities. The success of any peer-reviewed journal relies on attracting these contributors.

Editors of the British Medical Journal ( BMJ ) and the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ) have urged that peer review itself should be largely and extensively studied ( 3 ). Studies have shown that peer review is ineffective, prone to bias, and abuse and lack the power to spot errors and fraud. The time between the selection of reviewer or associate editor and the receipt of the reviews averages one to two months. But no journal could afford to abandon peer review.

Many journals have tried to streamline the review and editing processes in order to achieve short average lead times from submission to publication. Even if faster publication is an obvious advantage of journals, very short processing times may lead to some problems including the insecurity of the quality of the review.

Utilize open-access publishing models actively

Open-access publishing is gaining momentum and public acceptance worldwide. More and more articles are published open access and can be downloaded free of charge as soon as they are published electronically. Open-access journals and open-access archives are dramatically transforming the process of academic communication and especially can bring tangible benefits to academics in developing countries ( 4 ). Academicians and publishers in developing world need to be more aware of the benefits of open access and open archiving, and create a more receptive environment and fertile ground for open access journals.

A study has demonstrated that the number of open-access journals increased by 500% and the number of articles by 900% during the decade 2000-2009 ( 5 ). The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 8,000 open-access journals, many of which are highly regarded according to conventional metrics of excellence ( 6 ). The very best way to test the impact advantage of open access is to compare the citation counts of individual open access and non-open access articles, and analytic study has demonstrated a dramatic citation advantage for open access.

Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) study has showed that traditional journals and open-access journals have similar citation impact factors. The report revealed that of the 8,700 selected journals covered in Web of Science when the study was carried out, 191 are open-access journals. There is no significant difference in terms of citation impact or frequency with which the journal is cited.

Accumulating evidence showed that the proportion of researchers publishing in open-access journals has kept growing considerably. Open access definitely is able to widen the global circle of those who can participate in science and benefit from it ( 7 - 13 ). Academics in developing countries are becoming informed that they can expand the visibility of their publications by making them open access.

Among the three categories of open access, “green” open access, “gold” open access and “hybrid gold” open access categories ( 14 ), Chinese Journal of Cancer Research ( CJCR ) chose ‘gold’ open access model. “Green” open access journals permit authors to post their papers on their institution’s website or personal website as soon as the article is published. There is no fee or embargo period. “Gold” open-access journals publish all articles open access, and the fees are paid by authors. “Hybrid gold” open access provides option for author to publish their articles open access for a fee or not be open-accessed without a fee.

The Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project has conducted a large scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open-access publishing ( 15 ). Around forty thousand responses were collected across disciplines and around the world, showing an overwhelming support for the idea of open access, while highlighting funding and quality as the main barriers to publishing in open access journals. Libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics should further analyze opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open-access publishing.

Find ways of saving costs and getting revenue

“All publishing is theft”, joked by a BMA’s librarian, and ironically, this guy left to join Reed-Elsevier, the world’s most profitable publisher of science. Medical journals mainly publish articles written by researchers, and these articles are submitted to journals for free. The tremendous cost of these researches is covered by public money. The journals conduct peer review before publishing the studies, and unpaid academics contribute to the peer review and editing process. The journals are sold to academic libraries at high prices. Annual subscription to some journals may be over 2,000 dollars. Publishers and commercial companies earned profit and grew rich from their journals. The ethics of scientific publishing are highly suspected.

Legislation should elicit laws of libel to cover medical journals. In Britain, these laws are strict. BMJ had once been involved in one of largest libel cases. While some other experts argued that concern with ethical issues in publishing medical journals would make research harder to do, since scientific research is badly needed and can’t afford much more barriers.

The paper and postage costs, costs associated with online submission-and-review systems and hosting platforms, costs of validating and disseminating research output must be covered anyway. According to the study conducted by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates in 2010, the average journal’s cost per article for production in print and electronic formats was approximately £2,500 ( 16 ). For the American Physiological Society, the average cost per article was approximately $2,635 ( 17 ). Since in open access era, there is not much possibility of charging for access through subscriptions or licenses, one way to cover the publishing cost is author payments. This is the transformation from reader payment to author payment era. This is based on the fact that authors have funds for publication.

Although there are many funding options available for financial support for journals, including article processing fees, advertisement and social affiliations, the funding should be streamlined according to the needs and resources of the journals. Article processing charge is the central funding mechanism for large-scale full open access publishing. It is the quality and subject field of the journal that determines the processing charge authors are willing to pay.

As to open-access journals, after analyzing the author’s behavior and satisfaction, effect on financial and subscription, usage and citations, researchers from Oxford Journals concluded that one charge model won’t fit all journals ( 18 ). Diverse models including delayed free access, subscription access and combination with full or optional open access would be more adaptive. Open access adjustment don’t necessarily lead to an actual price decrease year after year, and they may simply ameliorate the increase in price.

Deal with research fraud or misconduct

Being exposed to media public as having published fraudulent research, medical journals usually feel helpless in the face of pain. Some scientists argued that fraud had not been so often and had never harmed anybody since science is self-correcting. But in recent years we could not take it easy anymore. BMJ editor Richard Smith had to call editor of the Lancet in 2002 telling him that two major trials the Lancet had published were fraudulent.

Only a few countries have clear concern and response to scientific fraud or misconduct. COPE is a committee on publication ethics founded in 1997 by medical editors in Britain. It is a self-help organization for responding to research fraud or misconduct. This organization has dealt with hundreds of research misconduct cases ( 19 , 20 ).

Medical editors are actually at the frontier of the response process to research misconduct. Editors should lay more emphasis on and pay more attention to this issue. Misconduct cases dealt by COPE came from a few journals. It is not possible that these journals have risks while others do not.

It is necessary to let the editors know how to respond when they decide there is problem. Universities, institutions and organizations need to know what action to take when the editors inform them the possibility of research misconduct.

Maintain sound relationship with pharmaceutical companies

There is another ethical problem faced by many medical journals, the close association with pharmaceutical companies. Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers, admitted in 2009 that it had published six “fake journals” funded by pharmaceutical companies ( 21 ). These journals were sponsored article compilation publications and were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures. Pharmaceutical companies played a key role in the development and utilization of almost all new drugs during the past decades. The interests of the pharmaceutical companies, doctors, patients, regulating organizations and medical journals are the main issue of the ethical problem. Medical journals do not need to separate themselves from pharmaceutical companies intensely once the relationship with companies can be ethically sound.

The pharmaceutical companies may want patients to take their drugs even if they are not superior to other drugs. They may push drug rather than other non-drug treatments, even non-drug treatment is more important in tackling disease. Some medical journals have been bonded with pharmaceutical companies and depend on them in financial terms. Even the most prestigious medical journals publish trials funded by the industry. Most of the results of these trials are favorable to the companies.

After advertising the results of the trials, the medical journals can get profitable income by selling the reprints of the articles to the funding companies. Some companies might pay more than one million dollars for the reprints of the study they funded.

Until very recently, medical journals didn’t ask their authors and reviewers about conflicts of interest, they didn’t manage conflicts of interest very effectively. Actually most authors in medical journals have financial conflicts of interest due to their relations with pharmaceutical companies. These undeclared conflicts of interest may influence the studies published and the conclusions authors reach. The intent of soliciting larger number of submissions may dilute the scrutiny of conflict of interest, and pharmaceutical companies thus may take advantage of slack journal standards. Professional editors and experienced staff need to be alert to ferret out conflicts of interest. Medical journals don’t need to intensely avoid publishing articles written by authors with conflicts of interest, but need to do a better job at managing conflicts of interest.

Prove useful in clinical practice and research realm

Journals are the main link between science and practice. Medical journals should aim to deliver value appreciated by doctors and researchers, ignite thoughts and debate, and draw their attention to what might be important. Materials of limited relevance and quality which cannot answer any questions arising in practice rarely lead to change or improvement in the research and clinical practice. Journals sent to doctors are filled with complex science, most of which depends on statistical analyses doctors do not understand. There is no wonder doctors spend little time reading the research papers in journals, not to mention the time spent on reading one complex study. They are more likely to grab the information of studies on throwaways newspapers.

Journals should manage to publish more important scientific studies which can separate them from the throwaways, and attract worldwide reputation and subscription. A good medical journal is an asset not only to medical community but also to the funding institutions and organizations. Even more and more scientific findings are posted on publicly available websites rather than in scientific journals, it is the science that a journal publishes which gives the journal authority and reputation.

The Internet has dramatically and permanently changed the ways in which information can be discussed and disseminated, mostly for the better. We are in ‘attention economy’, and we have to compete with a variety of pleasures for doctors’ attention. But medical journals have to stick to their fundamental principles and may be not that eagerly to seek publicity at any price. After all, coverage in the mass media is good for medical journals both in prestige and business terms. Patients can become even more informed than doctors by visiting journals’ websites. Patients get involved in making informed clinical decisions. Some journals even have patients on editorial boards or editors. Patients are partners instead of objects any more. Still, medical journals need to enlarge their influence on the practice of medicine and research realm.

Studies showed that scholarly publishing in developing world is still dominated by conventional print format which is expensive for production and distribution ( 22 - 25 ). The international readership of these journals is pretty low reflecting in the low visibility and impact, which is hampering the growth of them into internationally recognized journals. Improved access can improve the citations and impact factor. Impact factor is a recognized scale for assessing journals. When impact factor is improved, it can increase the credibility and then the submissions of the journal.

Tenopir et al . found that medical faculty may be more comfortable with traditional format of scholarly journals. They use medical journals for much of their professional development and to stay current with progress in their field. Their reading primarily comes from recently published articles, mostly of which is from personal subscriptions. Approximately 70% of readings rely on print journals. Librarians and publishers need to find ways to provide attributes of convenience and currency and match the portability of personal subscriptions in electronic journal format for medical faculty.

To sum up, recognizing the importance of creating a positive change in the international, scientific, scholarly peer-reviewed journals scenario all over the world and more in developing countries, we believe there is urgent need to build infrastructure in the publishing and archiving, and support to benefit scholars and publishers, especially regional journals and small publishers. Only after active exploration of developing strategies, can medical journals pave the way for successful international, scientific, scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

Acknowledgements

Disclosure: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• 31 May 2024

Biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years — why?

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Retraction rates in European biomedical science papers have quadrupled since 2000. Credit: bagi1998/Getty

The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers increased fourfold between 2000 and 2021, a study of thousands of retractions has found.

Two-thirds of these papers were withdrawn for reasons relating to research misconduct, such as data and image manipulation or authorship fraud . These factors accounted for an increasing proportion of retractions over the roughly 20-year period, the analysis suggests.

“Our findings indicate that research misconduct has become more prevalent in Europe over the last two decades,” write the authors, led by Alberto Ruano‐Ravina, a public-health researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Other research-integrity specialists point out that retractions could be on the rise because researchers and publishers are getting better at investigating and identifying potential misconduct. There are more people working to spot errors and new digital tools to screen publications for suspicious text or data.

Rising retractions

Scholarly publishers have faced increased pressure to clear up the literature in recent years as sleuths have exposed cases of research fraud , identified when peer review has been compromised and uncovered the buying and selling of research articles . Last year saw a record 10,000 papers retracted . Although misconduct is a leading cause of retractions, it is not always responsible: some papers are retracted when authors discover honest errors in their work.

More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record

The latest research, published on 4 May in Scientometrics 1 , looked at more than 2,000 biomedical papers that had a corresponding author based at a European institution and were retracted between 2000 and mid-2021. The data included original articles, reviews, case reports and letters published in English, Spanish or Portuguese. They were listed in a database collated by the media organization Retraction Watch, which records why papers are retracted.

The authors found that overall retraction rates quadrupled during the study period — from around 11 retractions per 100,000 papers in 2000 to almost 45 per 100,000 in 2020. Of all the retracted papers, nearly 67% were withdrawn due to misconduct and around 16% for honest errors. The remaining retractions did not give a reason.

Looking at the papers retracted for misconduct specifically, Ruano‐Ravina and his colleagues found that the major causes have changed over time. In 2000, the highest proportions of retractions were attributed to ethical and legal problems, authorship issues — including dubious or false authorships, objections to authorship by institutions and lack of author approval — and duplication of images , data or large passages of text. By 2020, duplication was still one of the top reasons for retraction, but a similar proportion of papers was retracted owing to ‘unreliable data’ (see ‘Misconduct retractions’).

Source: Ref 1

‘Unreliable data’ refers to studies that cannot be trusted for reasons including original data not being provided and problems with bias or lack of balance. The authors suggest that the rise in retractions attributable to this cause could be related to an increase in the number of papers suspected to be produced by paper mills , businesses that generate fake or poor-quality papers to order.

Authorship problems fell to the joint fifth reason for retractions in 2020. This is “possibly due to the implementation of authorship control systems and increased researcher awareness”, write Ruano‐Ravina and colleagues.

International variation

The study also identified the four European countries that had the highest number of retracted biomedical science papers: Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. Each had distinct ‘profiles’ of misconduct-related retractions. In the United Kingdom, for example, falsification was the top reason given for retractions in most years, but the proportion of papers withdrawn because of duplication fell between 2000 and 2020. Meanwhile, Spain and Italy both saw huge rises in the proportion of papers retracted because of duplication.

Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, contributed to work that in 2012 found similar rates of paper withdrawal for misconduct 2 . “To me, this argues that the underlying problems in science have not changed appreciably in the past 12 years,” he says.

But the overall increase in retraction rates could reflect the fact that authors, institutions and journals are increasingly using retractions to correct the literature, he adds.

Science’s fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper mills

Sholto David, a biologist and research-integrity specialist based in Wales, UK, points out that methods for detecting errors in research improved during the 20-year study period. An increasing number of people now scan the literature and point out flaws, which could help to explain increasing retraction rates, he says. In particular, the launch of the post-publication peer-review website PubPeer in 2012 has offered sleuths the opportunity to scrutinize papers en masse, he adds, and it has become much more common for researchers to send whistle-blowing e-mails to journals.

Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch’s co-founder who is based in New York City, suggests that the routine use of plagiarism-detection software by publishers during the past decade might have contributed to the rising rates of retraction because of plagiarism and duplication. It remains to be seen how more recent digital tools, such as those that detect image manipulation, could affect paper withdrawal rates in the coming years, he adds.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01609-0

Freijedo-Farinas, F., Ruano-Ravina, A., Pérez-Ríos, M., Ross, J. & Candal-Pedreira, C. Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04992-7 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Fang, F. C., Steen, R. G. & Casadevall, A. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA109 , 17028–17033 (2012).

Download references

Reprints and permissions

Related Articles

• Scientific community

China seeks global impact and recognition

Nature Index 05 JUN 24

China’s research clout leads to growth in homegrown science publishing

Chinese science still has room to grow

Chinese research collaborations shift to the Belt and Road

A guide to the Nature Index

Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Warmly Welcomes Talents Abroad

Qiushi Chair Professor; Qiushi Distinguished Scholar; ZJU 100 Young Researcher; Distinguished researcher

No. 3, Qingchun East Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang (CN)

Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital Affiliated with Zhejiang University School of Medicine

Proteomics expert (postdoc or staff scientist)

We are looking for a (senior) postdoc or postdoc-level staff scientist from all areas of proteomics to become part of our Proteomics Center.

Frankfurt am Main, Hessen (DE)

Goethe University (GU) Frankfurt am Main - Institute of Molecular Systems Medicine

Tenured Position in Huzhou University School of Medicine (Professor/Associate Professor/Lecturer)

※Tenured Professor/Associate Professor/Lecturer Position in Huzhou University School of Medicine

Huzhou, Zhejiang (CN)

Huzhou University

Electron Microscopy (EM) Specialist

APPLICATION CLOSING DATE: July 5th, 2024 About the Institute Human Technopole (HT) is an interdisciplinary life science research institute, created...

Human Technopole

Post-Doctoral Fellow in Chemistry and Chemical Biology

We are seeking a highly motivated, interdisciplinary scientist to investigate the host-gut microbiota interactions that are associated with driving...

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Harvard University - Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies