Examining Trends in Dermatology Publications: A 10-Year Follow-up

November 2021 | Volume 20 | Issue 11 | Features | 1248 | Copyright © November 2021


Published online October 26, 2021

Reem Qabas Al Shabeeb MD,a,b Kamaria Nelson MD,c Kelley Pagliai Redbord MDd

aSchool of Medicine and Health Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 
bDepartment of Internal Medicine, Inova Fairfax Medical Campus, Falls Church, VA
cDepartment of Dermatology, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC
dDermatology and Dermatologic Surgery Group of Northern Virginia, Vienna, VA

expect that these differences could have significantly impacted our analysis. The limited use of the keywords was a limitation mentioned in Mimouni et al that we did not work on expanding as we wanted to maintain our ability to compare our results to theirs. Finally, as MEDLINE is dynamic with articles being added periodically, we cannot compare the exact numbers in our study to that of Mimouni et al as the numbers would have differed by now; for example, at the time the study by Mimouni et al was analyzed, there were 910 adult publications with 26 randomized controlled trials in the search year 1993. Repeating the search criteria in June of 2018 for the year 1993 resulted in 2605 adult publications with 117 randomized controlled trials. The corresponding author of Mimouni et al was contacted to confirm our use of the correct search criteria as outlined in the methods section of the paper.

CONCLUSIONS

By analyzing the trends in adult and pediatric dermatology publications from 2008–2017, new trends have been found compared to the 1993–2007 analysis. The new statistically significant increase in higher level of evidence publications such as meta-analyses and practice guidelines is encouraging to the current state of research in the field of dermatology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Andrew D. Sparks who completed the statistical analysis for this work.

DISCLOSURES

All authors declare no conflict of interest.

REFERENCES

1. Mimouni D, Pavlovsky L, Akerman L, David M, Mimouni FB. Trends in dermatology publications over the past 15 years. Am J Clin Dermatol. 2010;11(1):55‐58. doi:10.2165/11530190-000000000-00000
2. Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group. Evidence-based medicine. A new approach to teaching the practice of medicine. JAMA. 1992;268(17):2420‐2425. doi:10.1001/jama.1992.03490170092032
3. Shashikiran ND. MEDLINE, PubMed, and PubMed central (®): Analogous or dissimilar. J Indian Soc Prev Dent. 2016;34(3):197‐198. doi:10.4103/0970-4388.186748

AUTHOR CORRESPONDENCE

Reem Al Shabeeb MD reem_shabeeb@gwmail.gwu.edu
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