Trends in dermatologic surgery research over the past decade

We aimed to study the rate of change in number and categories of publications in dermatologic surgery in dermatology versus non-dermatology journals. PubMed was searched for articles on dermatologic surgery from January 1, 1998 to December 31, 2007, using the search word "dermatology" AND "surgery". Articles were characterized by publication and journal type per year. Regression analysis was used to determine the effect of year of publication on number of publications of each type. The search yielded 7570 publications on dermatologic surgery. Seventy-three percent appeared in dermatology journals. Overall, the number of publications increased linearly with time. Most of this increase was accounted for by publications in non-dermatology journals. However, there was an increase in randomized control trials over the course of the study period in dermatology journals only, while low quality-of-evidence publications accounted for most of the increase in non-dermatology journals. Over the past 10 years the field of dermatologic surgery has had a significant yearly increase in published original studies. It appears that high quality evidence on dermatologic surgery is mostly published in dermatology journals. Current trends towards evidence-based dermatology might impact future research and publications in the field of dermatologic surgery.