[Bibliometric study of the journal Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas (1984-2003). I. Production analysis]

Analyze the scientific articles published in Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas (AD) between 1984 and 2003. The main bibliometric parameters analyzed were: number of articles, their length and type, primary subject areas, authorship of the documents, main contributing centers, departmental areas and geographic distribution of the articles.

All of the scientific articles published in the regular issues of the journal Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas between 1984 and 2003 (two decades), corresponding to volumes 75 to 94, were reviewed manually.

A total of 2,604 articles were published in the journal AD during the period studied, with a yearly average of 130 articles. Clinical cases or notes were the main type of document (66.2 %), followed by original articles (23.5 %) and review articles (4.7 %). The length of the documents varied from 1 to 33 pages, with an average of 4.55 pages. The subjects that were most discussed in the documents from this period were dermatopathology (15.9 %) and therapeutics (15.4 %). A total of 11,667 authorships were found, with 2,907 different authors. The average number of authors per article for the period was 4.48. 56.7 % of the authors were occasional contributors (having signed a single document), while 3.5 % were top contributors, having signed 20 or more works over this period. Seven Autonomous Communities accounted for 85.5 % of the articles. The Community of Madrid was by far the largest contributor (917 documents, 35.2 %), followed by Andalusia (422, 16.2 %), Catalonia (240, 9.2 %) and Castile-León (221, 8.5 %). The 2,604 documents in the study were from 293 different centers, which accounted for 2,977 co-authorships. Most of these co-authorships were from large hospitals or hospital complexes. The most noteworthy of these were the Madrid hospitals 12 de Octubre (281 co-authorships) and Clínico San Carlos (153), and Hospital Universitario San Cecilio in Granada (149). Dermatology was the specialty of most of the authors (90.8 % of those authors listed first). The main specialty collaborating with dermatology was pathology, taking part in 28.5 % of the articles.

An analysis of the productivity of the journal AD over two decades gives us an idea of scientific activity in dermatology in Spain, because of the journal's quantitative and qualitative significance in the context of Spanish dermatology.