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The number of scientific and engineering articles published in the following fields: physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, clinical medicine, biomedical research, engineering and technology, and earth and space sciences. The NSF considers article counts from a set of journals covered by Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).

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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 )

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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Proliferations of Scientific Medical Journals: A Burden or A Blessing

"There are only a handful of ways to do a study properly, but one thousand ways to do it wrong." McMaster University

Scientific Medical Journal publication is rapidly increasing in volume. It has become the most explosive field of journal publications worldwide. Medical practitioners require proven strategies to benefit from these immense publications to keep up with current literatures. The task of teaching physicians to review medical literature critically has assumed increasing importance. The objective of this write up is to offer suggestions to help physicians improve their use of Scientific Medical Journals in their practice so as to be able to sieve out worthless journal articles.

Majority of the articles agreed that a quick review of the title , the introduction and the abstract of an article will guide a physician as to whether to continue to read or discard an article. A strategy is required in reading an article so as to benefit maximally from it.

In general, a quick scanning of the title, abstract , introduction , and conclusion sequentially usually will enable the reader to identify whether articles with interesting titles are truly of interest. If so, more time can be spent on methodology, results and discussion sections. As you read, always bear in mind the possibility of applying the study in your practice.

The use of Medical Journals as a form of medical education and sharing of information consistently ranks above the use of other sources of literature such as Newsletters, Textbooks, and Monographs. It serves as a means of continuing medical education better than other methods such as personal contact with colleagues, making clinical rounds, and continuing education courses. 1 - 6 However, most programs do not prepare doctors for critical review of literature.

A medical doctor should be familiar with analysis skills of medical literature so as to profit maximally in the use of this method of instruction. Reading medical journal is a standard method of increasing knowledge among the physicians world-wide. It enables medical practitioners to put to practice evidence base medicine. Any doctor who is not skilled in journal analysis is not likely to be skilful in medical practice. 4 , 7

Publications of Scientific Medical Journals started in the early 1600s. It has since then rapidly increased in volume representing the most explosive field of journal publications worldwide. 4 , 5 New medical articles are appearing at a rate of at least one every 26 seconds, 4 , 7 , 8 and if a physician were to read every medical journal published they would need to read 5000 articles per day. 9 , 10 It is therefore impossible for anyone to have a complete coverage of available medical articles. 4 , 7 , 11 Physicians must therefore be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in this era of "information jungle." The objective of this article is to consider the strategies involved in journal reading skills which will enable all practicing physicians to derive maximum benefit from medical journal education.

This write up was prepared using different sources. Data sources included Literatures searched from the National Library of Medicine’s online database and Google scholars. All articles were traced to their primary sources through available websites. The retrieved data was saved in a Citation Manager (Reference Manager 12) for processing of the retrieved information.

Physicians should read journals to attain, maintain and improve medical competence and to stay current with medical trends. Journals should also be consulted to seek solutions to specific patient care problems and to nourish a personal sense of inquisitiveness and interest about certain medical conditions. 1 , 4 , 6 , 7 , 9 , 12 - 17 A survey of self-reported reading time among 760 Norwegian doctors revealed that internists spend more time reading journals than surgeons and general practitioners. An average internist spent about 4 hours per week reading medical articles. 11 , 14 , 16 It is expected that doctors who want to update their knowledge should spend at least 4 hours per week reading high quality, peer reviewed Medical Journals. Medical Journals should be read, understood and be applied where appropriate. It is a highly recommended medium of acquiring high medical training and sharing of information among doctors. 4 , 7 , 16 - 18

Physicians should formulate a personalized journal reading list and ensure they have access to the key articles in their chosen fields. The syndrome of "publish-or-perish" rules have brought many junk journals into the circulation hence the need to be trained in the use of medical journal reading habit to ensure maximal benefit. Some journals are floated for purpose of promotion and they disappear from circulation after the aims have been achieved. If a doctor is looking for a high yield journal for information, there are guidelines that must be followed. Articles are chosen for their clinical and methodological relevance. It is pertinent to say that an article should not be judged by the journal in which it is published. A useless article may appear in a well respected journal and a good article in a relatively unknown journal. However, physicians are advised to select high-yield journals for regular reading and continue to add relevant ones to their list of Journal armamentarium. Do not jettison everything published and consider only the weaknesses of a study. Doctors should know that there is no such thing as a perfect article. 9 , 10 , 19 , 20 Always scan an article for technical complexity; if the technical complexity of the article far exceeds your ability to comprehend it, quickly discard it and move ahead.

Journal Articles are broadly grouped into four categories: Editorials, Clinical reviews, Education and debate and papers. Physicians’ reading areas should embrace all the four categories. 21 Your reading material should reflect the purpose of reading. A doctor will either be reading to find a specific solution to a clinical problem or to keep abreast of medical advance. In every good journal, every study has a purpose. The purpose of the article must satisfy your reason for reading the journal. The purpose of a published article or study can be found by reading the Introduction, Methods and the first paragraph of the Discussion. 3 , 7 , 19 , 22 - 24 This triad will give the direction of the journal article and whether it is worth spending time on. Sometimes doctors come across bizarre cases in unfamiliar grounds. What steps should they take? When a Physician comes across an unusual disease about which he or she needs specific information, scanning a textbook followed by reading a quality review article is an excellent approach. This process may be followed by scanning articles from "how to" journals such as Patient Care journals to identify practical insights. Finally, scanning original research articles will identify recent advances in the subject being considered. Original reports are first-hand accounts of planned investigations and their results. One should read only original articles that have direct bearing on his own clinical practice. In contrast, when a Physician is reading to keep abreast generally, he should include a few good review articles as they recently appear and scan reports of original research articles. These guidelines will help all doctors to formulate what articles to read in order to maximise time spent on journal reading.

Having selected a high yield article to read, there are further steps to take in reading the articles. A doctor cannot read all the available and relevant articles in his career. One of the major objectives for reading the medical literature is to develop clinical competence; this task is accomplished through efficiently extracting from the literature properly validated advances in medical knowledge of direct relevance to the physicians’ own practice. Physicians can derive immense satisfaction from keeping abreast of new developments in patient care by regularly scanning medical journal literature. Physicians must be learners throughout their careers and the learning must be self-directed, active and independent. The best way to reach this goal is to devote regular time to medical literature at least 30 minutes to one hour per day. However as the great volume of journal literature precludes physicians from reading all of it, special tactics of scanning, selecting and reading medical articles are necessary.

How then can one critically scan an article that has been selected for further reading? Even many experienced Physicians lack the skills, or, if they have the skills, they may have low self-confidence in their ability to read the article critically. These skills are seldom taught formally during medical school or residency training. Even the most dedicated readers will receive few benefits for their efforts if they lack the ability to separate the valuable contributions from trivial or misleading articles. 1 , 4 , 6 , 7 , 18 Reading strategies are required. ( Fig. 1 )

A Quick Guide for Selecting an Article for Further Reading.

Physicians should begin reading an article by looking at the Title of the article to determine general interest. If the title of the article is not interesting or appears not to be relevant to your practice, please abandon the article. Next, verify the article’s relevance by reading the Summary or the Abstract. A high-quality structured abstract is a good outline of a study. An abstract will enable you to have a bird’s eye view of the study. It is informative and should be able to stand apart from the article, but should not be used as the sole basis for a critical opinion of the study’s validity. 7 , 23 , 25 , 26 You must ask yourself a very valuable question when you go through a journal article. Examine to see that even if the article’s findings are true, and whether it is useful in clinical practice? Can it lead to a change of clinical practice? Is it of practical use for the reader, given his or her peculiar practice setting and peculiar patients especially in an African setting? Physicians should endeavor to know more than elementary descriptive statistics as greater than 42% of journals use statistical methods beyond elementary descriptive statistics. Critical reading of medical literature requires an understanding of many statistical methods. 27 The main objective of reading an article is to increase knowledge which may change or improve clinical practice. Applicability of any study is summarized in two words; validity and reliability. Reliability is the degree of consistency between repeated measures of the same thing. If the study was repeated, would the same data be obtained? Validity is the degree to which a study achieves the aim for which it was designed; does it represent the truth? Of the two concepts, validity is the most important but the most difficult to assess and above all the more subjective of the two. The two measures, validity and reliability are not mutually exclusive. 7 , 23 , 25 , 26 A study’s findings may be very reliable yet invalid.

There are two types of validity; internal and external. Internal validity usually refers to the ability of the study design to measure what it was intended to measure within the confines of the study. External validity has to do with whether conclusions can be applied to settings different from that used for the study, including the reader’s practice. 7 Therefore, providing answers to the above questions will assist you to know if the study is valid. Validity and applicability of a study start with the introduction section. What was the previous outcome of earlier studies? Make sure that the design is appropriate under methodology. Be sure that the study covered adequate period of study. Are the criteria for inclusion and exclusion of subjects clear? Were subjects randomly assigned? Was the randomization method described? Asses the outcome measures used in the study and be sure it is appropriate. Are statistical methods outlined appropriately? Satisfactory answers to the questions will attest to the validity and reliability of the study. 7 , 23 Remember that the result of a regular journal reading is the development of competence and confidence in distinguishing new findings that are reliable and valid from those that are not and deciding when new information should lead to a change in clinical practice. Remember also that "the only conclusion that a reader should make from a poorly designed study is that no conclusion can be made." 13 , 28

With the rapidity of increase in medical knowledge, physicians will have to rely heavily on medical journals to increase knowledge and improve medical competence. Reputable journals are to be selected for regular readings. Most doctors cannot read critically and some lack the knowledge in biostatistics needed to interpret many of the results in published clinical research. Teaching programs should include more effective biostatistics training in medical curricular to successfully prepare doctors for this important all-time learning skill. Most biostatistical education occurs in the pre-clinical years of medical school and the intensity of training varies dramatically among institutions. It is the responsibility of individual physician to become competent not only in clinical practice, but also competent consumers of the medical literature. Effective strategies for journal reading should be developed by each medical practitioner so that current literature can be critically reviewed.

Acknowledgements

The authors reported no conflict of interest and funding has been received on this work.

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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.

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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

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SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

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

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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.

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Sarah Boon (PhD, FRCGS) is a science writer and editor. Her articles have appeared in Nature, Science, Water Canada, Hakai Magazine, iPolitics, and CBC’s The Nature of Things. Sarah is a co-founder and serves on the Board of Science Borealis.

21st Century Science Overload

Do you feel overwhelmed by the number of research papers in your field? Do you wonder if you’re missing key ideas that could be critical for your research program? Does it feel like the deluge is only getting worse?

You’re not imagining things. According to research from the University of Ottawa, in 2009 we passed the 50 million mark in terms of the total number of science papers published since 1665, and approximately  2.5 million  new scientific papers are published each year.

What’s driving this publication explosion?

At its most basic level, we’ve seen a substantial increase in the total number of academic journals. As of 2014 there were approximately  28,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed journals . Add to this the increasing number of  predatory  or  fake  scientific journals, which produce high volumes of poor-quality research, and you have a veritable jungle of journals to wade through.

Another key factor is the sheer number of publishing scientists worldwide, which is increasing at a rate of approximately  4-5% per year . In British Columbia and Alberta alone, we’ve seen the conversion of more than seven colleges to universities in the past decade, and with these changes come new pressures on faculty to publish.

This pressure to “publish or perish”—and the increased competition amongst this growing pool of scientists—has resulted in some researchers becoming what’s termed “ salami slicers .” They divide papers into the least publishable unit in order to lengthen their publication list, increase the chances of being cited, and increase the opportunity to publish in journals with a high impact factor. This further contributes to the volume of papers published.

How does this paper deluge affect the scientific endeavour?

In a 2008 study, James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, suggested that the profusion of papers and associated ease of online access had led to a “ narrowing of science and scholarship ,” an echo chamber in which many researchers cited the same small pool of more recent studies to support their claims. He surveyed articles with citations from 1945–2005 and showed that, as more articles appeared online, scientists cited fewer of them in total and cited more recent ones with higher frequency, suggesting that older literature was no longer being read and/or cited.

Not everyone agreed with his results, however (see the ‘Letters’ at the bottom of  this link ). Some argued that, with more publications available online—and the digitization of older material—scientists had increased access to references that may have been more difficult to find in the pre-digital age. Others argued that, even with so many papers available online, digital search algorithms made it possible to efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff for research purposes.

Evans’ argument that fewer old studies are being cited is definitely a concern: one doesn’t want to accidentally reinvent the wheel by neglecting the relevant older literature. But as Jeremy Fox at  Dynamic Ecology  argues, an entrenched culture of reading and citing older papers can also hamper the advancement of a discipline because it “risks closing the field off to worthwhile input from outsiders.” While those ‘outsiders’ may have some unique ideas, they likely don’t have the same depth of knowledge as disciplinary ‘insiders’. In an era where interdisciplinary research is considered critical to solving many scientific problems, this can be a significant stumbling block.

I did my PhD on the cusp of the digital revolution. While I could find many new papers online, most of the older work was still in hardcopy format. I spent a lot of time at the library, photocopying, but I also used that time to browse. I’d look at other papers in the journals I was photocopying, and browse books on the shelves near where I found these journals. I’d often fortuitously stumble across something relevant that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Browsing allowed me to think laterally, to compare my research and results with work that perhaps overlapped on only one particular aspect. These comparisons sometimes shed light on my project, which might not have happened had I not found a particular article or book.

Thus, while the deluge of scientific papers may be managed with more efficient online searches that allow researchers to drill down into their research field more deeply, there are two possible drawbacks. One is that we’ll neglect the older literature, and the other is that we’ll lose our ability to explore laterally: to unexpectedly brush up against other studies, or even other disciplines, where we find information that’s potentially relevant to our current research.

How can we make the most of the digital deluge without compromising science quality?

There are several approaches that individual scientists can consider to make the most of the digital revolution while maintaining scientific integrity.

When citing an older paper in your work, always go back to the original rather than using a citation of that work from a more recent paper. This will keep from potentially propagating so-called “zombie” ideas: those that originate from a simple misunderstanding of the original paper, but are propagated through the literature because no one goes back to the original paper to verify the original idea.

As noted by Fox , don’t assume that the older literature automatically carries more weight than current literature—read both with the same critical approach.

Make time to read not only older literature, but current literature that’s related to—but not explicitly part of—your research. In an era where we seem to have less and less time for tangential tasks that don’t contribute directly to moving our careers forward, this can seem like a tall order. One way to simplify it is to solicit suggestions of “must read” older papers from more established researchers in your field. The other approach is to set aside an hour each week to browse new abstracts in relevant journals.

Finally, there’s a tool in development for science journalists that may be just as useful for scientists. The goal of  Science Surveyor  is to develop an algorithm that will take the text of an academic paper and search academic databases for other studies using similar terms. It will then present related articles, and also show how scientific thinking has changed over time by analysing how language is used across all the selected articles. Researchers—particularly those getting into new research fields—could use this type of algorithm as a first step in getting acquainted with the research field and how it’s changed over time.

One thing is for sure—the publication explosion isn’t going away, so the better we can manage it, the more likely we’ll be able to make the most of it.

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This scientist read a paper every day for 899 days. Here’s what she learned

Olivia Rissland says reading a different paper every day has made her a better scientist.

Natalie Parletta

Olivia Rissland says that her reading habits have made her "a much more well-rounded scientist". Credit: Olivia Rissland

8 September 2020

Olivia Rissland

Olivia Rissland says that her reading habits have made her "a much more well-rounded scientist".

Keeping up with the research literature is a must for any scientist, but it tends to slip down the priority list when there’s grant-writing, fieldwork, publishing, teaching, and analysis to be done.

“Reading papers definitely falls under that ‘important and not urgent’ category of activities,” says molecular biologist Olivia Rissland, who runs a lab focussed on understanding gene regulation at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

“It’s easy to say, ‘I’ll read that paper tomorrow,’ and then, how much time goes by and you haven’t read a single paper?”

On 1 January 2018, Rissland set herself the task of reading one paper per day, every day, as “a bit of a lark”.

“I thought, ‘Let’s see how long I can keep this up’, but within a month I was hooked,” she says. “I loved the exercise of learning something new every day and seeing how that opened up ideas in my own research.”

By June 17 2020, Rissland announced on Twitter that not only had she had kept the habit up, but it’s benefited her career in ways she couldn’t have predicted.

“As of today, I have read 899 papers in 899 days,” she tweeted. “I never would have imagined 2.5 years ago how much I would learn through this and how this would make me a better scientist and human."

Well-rounded

As well as keeping up with new research in her own field, Rissland now reads more broadly. She’s been pursing literature about the ethical and professional considerations in research, for example, such as the effects of systematic bias on promotion and hiring decisions.

Reading a paper from end to end has also helped her appreciate the nuances that would be missed by skimming the key findings of a paper, such as learning about different scientific methods.

“It’s made me a much more well-rounded scientist,” she says.

While Rissland says there’s no particular strategy guiding her choice of paper, she has a ‘to read’ folder on her computer, which currently has around 250 papers in it. “On most days I choose ones that strike my fancy,” she says.

“Sometimes there are topics that I want to take deep dives into, so I might focus on a topic for a few weeks. But I think part of the fun for me is just to read something that I want to, as opposed to something I have to.”

Rissland says her favourite paper of all time is “ The Mundanity of Excellence ”, a sociology paper about what makes swimmers excel. She says this paper “transformed how I approach science and running a lab”.

Habit-forming

Rissland made the habit stick by holding herself accountable – she shares insights from her daily reads on her lab’s Slack channel, ‘365 papers’.

She also keeps a record of the papers she reads on a Google sheet, which has a line for every day of the year.

“Adding each citation to the Google sheet gives me enough joy and a feeling of accomplishment that it keeps me going,” she says.

Rissland doesn’t cut herself any slack – peer review or sourcing references for her own publications don’t count towards her daily tally. And if she misses one day, or ten, such as when she goes on a family hiking trip, she makes up for it later.

“Dedicating time to reading papers is more important to my lab’s success than answering e-mails,” she says. “I don’t necessarily work more than anyone else, I just make sure I dedicate a set amount of time to reading every day. Rather than being a burden, most of the time this is a high point of my day.”

Rissland’s advice to other researchers who want to take up the challenge is to figure out a routine that’s realistic for them – especially students who read more slowly – such as dedicating 20 or 30 minutes a day to reading.

She also recommends setting realistic guidelines early on, which can help solidify the habit. “The hard ‘structure’ of it keeps me honest,” she says.

Above all, says Rissland, it has to be enjoyable.

“Most of the time it’s the nicest part of my day because I’m actually being a scientist, reading other people’s beautiful research,” she says. “I usually come away feeling really inspired and full of ideas.”

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Academics Write Papers Arguing Over How Many People Read (And Cite) Their Papers

Studies about reading studies go back more than two decades

Rose Eveleth

Contributor

There are a lot of scientific papers out there. One estimate  puts the count at 1.8 million articles published each year, in about 28,000 journals. Who actually reads those papers? According to one 2007 study , not many people: half of academic papers are read only by their authors and journal editors, the study's authors write. 

But not all academics accept that they have an audience of three. There's a heated dispute around academic readership and citation—enough that there have been studies about reading studies going back for more than two decades.

In the  2007 study , the authors introduce their topic by noting that  “as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” They also claim that 90 percent of papers published are never cited. Some academics are unsurprised by these numbers. “ I distinctly remember focusing not so much on the hyper-specific nature of these research topics, but how it must feel as an academic to spend so much time on a topic so far on the periphery of human interest,” writes Aaron Gordon at Pacific Standard . “Academia’s incentive structure is such that it’s better to publish something than nothing,” he explains, even if that something is only read by you and your reviewers. 

But not everybody agrees these numbers are fair. The claim that half of papers are never cited comes first from a paper from 1990. “ Statistics compiled by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) indicate that 55% of the papers published between 1981 and 1985 in journals indexed by the institute received no citations at all in the 5 years after they were published,” David P. Hamilton wrote in Science . 

In 2008, a team found that the problem is likely getting worse . “ As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles.” But some researchers took issue with that study, arguing that using different methods you could get quite different results. “Our own extensive investigations on this phenomenon… show that Evans’ suggestions that researchers tend to concentrate on more recent and more cited papers does not hold at the aggregate level in the biomedical sciences, the natural sciences and engineering, or the social sciences,” the authors write. This group of researchers found that plenty of old papers, for instance, were racking up readers over time.

It seems like this should be an easy question to answer: all you have to do is count the number of citations each paper has. But it’s harder than you might think. There are entire papers themselves dedicated to figuring out how to do this efficiently and accurately. The point of the 2007 paper wasn’t to assert that 50 percent of studies are unread. It was actually about citation analysis and the ways that the internet is letting academics see more accurately who is reading and citing their papers. “Since the turn of the century, dozens of databases such as Scopus and Google Scholar have appeared, which allow the citation patterns of academic papers to be studied with unprecedented speed and ease,” the paper's authors wrote.

Hopefully, someone will figure out how to answer this question definitively, so academics can start arguing about something else. 

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Rose Eveleth | | READ MORE

Rose Eveleth was a writer for Smart News and a producer/designer/ science writer/ animator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times , Scientific American , Story Collider , TED-Ed and OnEarth .