Tracking the Growth of Drug Therapy Literature Using PubMed
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Tracking the Growth of Drug Therapy Literature Using PubMed
Dennis F. Thompson, PharmD Associate Dean, Professor, and Chair, Department of Pharmacy Practice, College of Pharmacy, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Weatherford, Oklahoma Nancy Toedter Williams, PharmD Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice, College of Pharmacy, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Weatherford, Oklahoma
Key Words PubMed; Publications; Drug literature; Bibliometrics Correspondence Address Dennis F. Thompson, PharmD, FASHP, FCCP, Associate Dean, Professor, and Chair, Department of Pharmacy Practice, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Pasteur Medical Building, Suite 241, 1111 North Lee, Oklahoma City, OK 73103 (e-mail: [email protected]). This article was presented in part at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, December 2005.
The biomedical literature has exploded over the past 50 years. The purpose of this study was to track the growth of drug therapy literature using the online provider PubMed. We utilized the first 20 Disease [C] MeSH listed on the 2005 MeSH tree structures for our study. Drug therapy literature was searched using the disease MeSH with the ending /drug therapy or /chemically induced. Publication numbers were compiled each year from 1966 to 2003. Disease articles increased by 612% from 1966 to 2003. Drug therapy articles increased by 1,116% during the same period. As a percentage of all disease articles, drug therapy publications increased from 11% to 18% over this time period.
INTRODUCTION It is impossible for any clinician to keep up with all the biomedical literature published today. Haynes et al. (1) stated the problem: “If physicians were to read everything of possible biomedical relevance, they would need to read 5,500 articles per day.” Of course, this statement was published in 1986, when there were approximately 20,000 biomedical journals published in the world. Today, there are over 40,000 journals, so a clinician now has to read over 10,000 articles per day to keep up (2). It seems clear that the biomedical literature is proliferating at an accelerated rate. But, does the entire body of literature grow uniformly? Are there subsections of the literature growing at a faster or slower rate? Obviously, there are scientifically “hot” areas that probably expand rapidly for a period of time. We were curious regarding the growth of the pharmacotherapy literature relative to the disease literature and the biomedical literature as a whole. Bibliometrics can be defined as “the use of statistical methods in the analysis of a body of literature to reveal the historical development of subject fields and patterns of authorship, publi-
Drug therapy review articles grew by 10,521% over the time period; drug therapy randomized clinical trials increased by 5,228%. Geriatric drug therapy articles increased at a greater rate than pediatric literature (1,210% vs. 637%). Infectious disease (14%), oncology (14%), immunologic diseases (10%), card
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