International publication trends originating from anaesthetic departments from 2001 to 2015

The aim of this study was to analyse publication trends from the anaesthetic literature of the G-20 countries. We performed a literature search in Medline to identify articles related to anaesthetic departments published between 2001 and 2015, by specific G-20 countries according to the affiliation field of the authors, and to three time periods 2001-2005, 2006-2010 and 2011-2015. The number of articles, number of original articles (vs. reviews, editorials or correspondence), articles per million inhabitants, and citations per article were analysed. In total, 96,920 articles were published between 2001 and 2015 in 74 anaesthetic and in 4117 non-anaesthetic journals, with an increase of +104% absolute (i.e. from 23,028 in 2001-05 to 46,887 articles ìn 2010-15) and +85% as articles per million inhabitants. Similarly, the number of original articles increased by 21%, but the anaesthetic specialty's share of original articles (as a proportion of total articles in biomedicine) decreased from 31% in 2001-2005 to 19% in 2011-2015 (-38%). The USA published most articles (2011-15 16,016; 31% of total), second came the EU as a whole and third Japan (from 2001 to 2005) or Germany (2006-2010) until 2011-2015 when China took over the third rank. In 2011-2015, Canada published most articles per million inhabitants (68.7 articles/million inhabitants). China and India exhibited the most publication growth 11- and 9-fold, respectively, and are now among the top five countries for the number of published articles.