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Global Authorship Trends in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal
Christopher van Belle, MD
W. John Kitzmiller, MD
University of Cincinnati Medical Center
2018-02-15
Presenter: Christopher van Belle, MD
Affidavit:
Agreed
Director Name: W John Kitzmiller
Author Category: Resident Plastic Surgery
Presentation Category: Clinical
Abstract Category: General Reconstruction
Plastic and reconstructive surgeons draw their fund of knowledge and specialized surgical techniques from a broad base of global contributors, from India's Sushruta and Italy's Tagliacozzi to the UK's Gillies and Taiwan's Fu-Chan Wei. Here we characterize global contributions to PRS from 1988, when author affiliations were first indexed in MEDLINE, to 2015. A search was performed in PubMed for all articles published in PRS from January 1988 to December 2015 with the indexed publication type of "Journal Article". MapAffil was used to parse the source country of each article's listed author affiliation, which we defined as the primary affiliation of the first author. A total of 13,944 articles were reviewed. Articles whose author geographic affiliations were not listed were excluded from these counts. The top ten contributing countries to PRS over this period are the USA (7,770 articles), Japan (730), Canada (516), Taiwan (378), the UK (373), South Korea (341), Turkey (290), Germany (290), Italy (273), and China (256). The proportion of articles in the journal contributed from countries other than the US was largely unchanged from 34% in 1988 to 32% in 2015, while the total number of articles published annually over that period dramatically increased from 251 in 1988 to 828 in 2015. The journal's strong growth in publication volume, along with its increasing volume of global contributions, reflect the journal's position as a global cache of our field's past and present knowledgebase.
