Authors: R Gunzburg
Publish Date: 2016/03/17
Volume: 25, Issue: 4, Pages: 975-975
Abstract
In 2005 I looked at some numbers on PubMed for a presentation I had to give at that time While typing the word ‘spine’ it generated 86320 hits By adding the term ‘surgery’ this number became 29983 Today I did the same and got 181850 and 79589 hits respectively—more than a doubling of the amount of publications over an 11year span What does this tell us That our knowledge increases or merely that we publish moreWei et al present a study on ‘worldwide research productivity in the field of spine surgery a 10year bibliometric analysis’ in this latest issue of the European Spine Journal Their title in fact is a misnomer for they looked at the research productivity in the field of spine and not only spine surgery This reflects the profile of most of the publications they analysed Indeed Spine the European Spine Journal and The Spine Journal are multidisciplinary journals dealing with the spine in general not only surgery Interestingly the six most cited articles from the last 10 years are nonsurgical papersI have my reservations however at the quality of what is being produced and published The number of papers submitted to the European Spine Journal has gone up from 551 in 2005 to 1919 in 2015 Unfortunately the quality of the submissions has not gone up correspondingly Often I see papers that are unnecessary repetitions of previously published studies as researchers may overlook studies which appeared some decades ago I am not convinced that this increase in publication rate necessarily leads to a better medicine improved outcomes and happier patients or happier health care payers for that matterStill too many papers are retrospective and of poor design or with too many confounding factors Whereas the gold standard of ‘controlled randomized trial’ remains one to strive for in spite of possible ethical concerns valuable alternatives such as papers emanating from registries gain fieldWei et al found that China and Korea show the most dramatic increase in publication rate To guide researchers in that part of the world plan their studies well and thus increase their chance of acceptance for publication the European Spine Journal is holding a workshop on ‘How to increase the chance for acceptance of a publication’ during the upcoming Spine Week conference which is being held in Singapore from May 16–20 2016 http//wwwspineweek2016org
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