The scientific literature in diagnostic radiology for American readers: a survey and analysis of journals, papers, and authors.

The scientific literature in diagnostic radiology for American readers was surveyed by studying the recent growth of its journals, papers and authors. The number of journals has increased rapidly, following the growth in the production of papers. Of the 36 scientific diagnostic radiology journals available at a university medical center, 18 began publication in 1973 or later. The proliferation of new journals should moderate as the size of the American diagnostic radiology research community stabilizes and the newer journals publish a growing share of the papers. Citation analysis, a method of studying interrelationships between papers and journals, showed that citations from papers published in clinical journals to papers published in diagnostic radiology journals accounted for 6% of total citations made in those clinical journals. This observation indicates that research in diagnostic radiology has considerable relevance to research in clinical medicine. Although the number of papers from American diagnostic radiology researches increased from 468 papers in two journals in 1960 to 2861 papers in 16 journals in 1984, the number of researchers increased more rapidly, resulting in a decline in aggregate productivity. At the same time, the average number of authors per paper increased from 2.15 in 1960 to 4.36 in 1985. The first authorship of a scientific paper appears to be the most suitable quantitative measure of research productivity. Study of a sample of 130 diagnostic radiology researchers showed that, on average, each researcher published 3.8 papers as first author in the 5 years from 1980 to 1984. The most prolific 15% of the authors published 52% of the papers.