Authorship trends in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Publications are an important tool to measure one's success and achievement in academia. They can help propel a career forward and move one into a position of leadership. The overall purpose of this study was to investigate changes in bibliometric variables, authorship, and collaboration trends in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research (JOR®), since its inception in 1983. A bibliometric analysis was completed for all manuscripts meeting the inclusion criteria (638), which were published throughout the inaugural year plus one representative year of each decade. Several parameters were investigated including numbers of manuscripts, authors, collaborating institutions/countries, references, pages, and citations; region of origin and gender of authors over time and by region were main focuses. Significant increases over time were observed in all bibliometric variables analyzed except in the number of pages and citations. There was an approximate 27% point increase for both female first and corresponding authors from 1983 to 2015. While this is most likely due to the increase in the number of women that have entered the field over time, similar increases in the percentage of women holding positions on the JOR editorial board or in leadership positions within in the field may have also contributed to improvements in gender parity. Understanding changes in publishing characteristics over time, by region, and by gender are critical, especially with the rising demands of publishing in academia. JOR has seen increase in most variables analyzed, including improvements in authorship by women in the field of orthopaedic research. © 2018 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res.

A Bibliometric Study of Authorship and Collaboration Trends Over the Past 30 Years in Four Major Musculoskeletal Science Journals

“…The detailed data for three of the four journals (BONE®, JBMR®, and JOR®) has been previously published [17][18][19]; the reader is directed to those manuscripts for detailed results. That data is from the same group of researchers and senior authors as the CTI® data; thus, we were able to use the raw data for comparison purposes in this manuscript.…”

Comparing the gender diversity and affiliation trends of the authors for two orthopaedics journals from the Arab world

“… 35 Seetharam et al., evaluating the publications from the Journal of Orthopaedic Research (JOR) during a 30-year period, detected a significant increasing trend in the number of authors per article; the average number of authors was 6.9 ± 2.7 in 2015 compared with 3.7 ± 1.9 in 1983, and there was a decline in the old trend of single authorship. 14 Camp and Escott conducted a bibliometric analysis (including authorship and affiliation trends) of the orthopaedic literature during 1949–2009 and found that the number of authors per article increased from an average of 1.6–5.1 over the 60-year period. 5 The increase in the number of co-authors, that is, enhanced scientist collaboration, helped change the approach to solving difficult problems and led to more innovation compared with that in the past decades.…”

“…evaluating the publications from the JOR during a 30-year period, the prevalence of a female being the first or corresponding author improved significantly from 5% and 3% in 1985 to 34% and 27% in 2015, respectively. 14 Although the two latter studies were performed on multidisciplinary orthopaedic and trauma journals and showed a higher prevalence of female authors compared with that for the JMSR, a direct comparison of the results may be inappropriate as both studies reported only on the first and corresponding authors.…”

“…In scientific publications, the increase in the cooperation among authors from different institutions both nationally and internationally has recently become more prominent. 14 , 38 This increase was attributed in part to the advancement in communication technology, which has eased the connection between research groups and authors in different locations. 6 , 39 , 40 In the current study, the average number of institutions contributing to the articles was significantly larger for the JMSR compared with that for the EOJ: these averages were 2.1 ± 1.2 and 1.1 ± 0.3 institutions per article, respectively.…”

“… 1 , 2 , 3 The gender, number, and affiliations of authors have been the topic of various reports in different medical and scientific fields 1 , 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ; in the orthopaedic literature in particular, this issue has been thoroughly examined in many publications. 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 …”