Pediatric burns research: A history or an evolution?

Pediatric burns research has increasingly been recognized as a sub-specialty of its own. The aim of this study was to assess and analyze the publication patterns of the pediatric burns literature over the last six decades.

A search strategy for the Web of Science database was designed for pediatric burns publications, with output analyzed between two periods: 1945-1999 (period 1) and 2000-2013 (period 2).

There were 1133 and 1194 publications for periods 1 (1945-1999) and 2 (2000-2013), respectively. The mean citation counts of the top 50 publications were 77 (range 45-278) and 49 (range 33-145) for periods 1 and 2, respectively. There were 26 and 20 authors with two or more publications in the top 50 list in periods 1 and 2, respectively. Of these there are two authors that have published 47 papers in both combined time-periods. There were 29 and 9 journals that have published 50% of the publications for time-period 1 and 2 respectively. In period 2, there were two burns journals that have published 37.2% of the total articles.

Pediatric burns research has evolved from an associated, dispersed entity into a consolidated sub-specialty that has been successfully integrated into mainstream burns journals.