Trends in dermatology publications over the past 15 years

There is a continually increasing amount of medical literature, which makes the challenge of keeping up to date in the field of dermatology increasingly difficult.

To test the hypothesis that the total number and the number in various categories of publications in pediatric and adult dermatology have increased over time in a linear fashion.

We evaluated all MEDLINE articles from 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2007. We limited the search to 'skin' AND 'diseases' OR 'dermatology' for adults and children. We used regression analysis to determine the effect of the year of publication on the number of publications of each type.

MEDLINE reported 17, 925 publications in adult dermatology and 9011 publications in pediatric dermatology during the evaluation period. There was a significant linear increase in the number of publications over the study period in both categories. There was a steady and similar increase over time in both pediatric and adult dermatology in total publications, randomized controlled trials, clinical trials, case reports, and letters to the editor, while there were too few meta-analyses, editorials, and clinical guidelines to make meaningful analyses of trends.

The fields of pediatric and adult dermatology have had a significant yearly increase in studies providing a high level of scientific evidence with a much slower rise in the number of articles providing a lower level of evidence.