World trend of peritoneal dialysis publications

To analyze the trend of global peritoneal dialysis (PD) publications, especially of publications in Peritoneal Dialysis International (PDI), from 1991 to 2005 according to the Institute for Scientific Information databases of the Thomson Corporation.

Data were downloaded from the Web of Science, which includes the databases of Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index. The searching strategies were key-in of "peritoneal dialysis" in general search and of "SO=Peritoneal Dialysis International" in advanced search. Only articles and reviews were included in the analysis. The analysis was stratified by publication year, journal, author, country of each author's affiliation, and citation count of each paper.

There were 7618 PD papers (6991 articles and 627 reviews) in 887 journals; 15.8% of them (n = 1204) were published in PDI. The annual outputs of global PD publications has been more than 500 papers since 1996, with a peak of 665 articles in 2003. In total, 18531 authors from 102 countries and areas contributed to PD publications. Authors from the USA were present in 30.6% of all papers although their global share decreased with time. A PD paper received an average of 12.7 citations. A review received more citations than an article (17.0 vs 12.3 on average), yet statistical significance was not reached (p = 0.216, Mann-Whitney U test).

The number of PD research societies in the world has been growing during the past 15 years. More and more research is from countries other than the USA and the United Kingdom. Papers on PD have thus been published in many journals other than PDI, the leading journal in PD. However, the growth rate of PD publications in the world is diminishing. We present here the most likely reasons for the decrease in PD publications and propose suggestions for PDI to keep its leading role in the development of PD.