Abstract

Background: With the intention to quantify the importance of a medical journal, the impact factor (IF) was introduced. It has become a de facto fictive rating instrument of the importance of medical journals. Also, it is often used to asses the value of the individual publications within the specific journal. The aim of the present study was to analyze publication trends over 20 years in five high-ranked anesthesiology journals.
Methods: The Medline (NCBI) database google.de was used for analysis which was restricted to the following journals:
a) Anesthesiology
b) British Journal of Anaesthesia
c) Journal of Neurosurgical Anesthesiology
d) Anesthesia & Analgesia
e) Anaesthesia.

Specific publication parameters (IFs, number of pages and authors, etc.) were retrived using the PubMed download function and imported into Microsoft Excel for further analysis.

Conclusion: The IF, as well as the number of articles per year and the number of authors per article, increased significantly. In contrast, the number of pages per article remained comparable during the period analyzed.
Result:The mean IF of the five journals analyzed increased significantly within the study period (1991 vs. 2010; +65.81%). However, the absolute number of case reports decreased significantly by 54.7% since 1991. The journals Br J Anaesth (12.2%), J Neurosurg Anesthesiol (51.9%), and Anesth Analg (41.2%) showed significant increases in the number of publications per year. The mean number of authors increased significantly in all the journals from 1991 to 2010 (3.0 vs. 4.3; +43.3%).

Keywords:Impact factor; Scientific publication; Scientific journal; Publication trend

Keywords:OAJ: Open Access Journals; IF: Impact Factor; ISI: Institute for Scientific Information; NCBI: National Center for Biotechnology Information; RCT: Randomized Controlled Trials