Trends in paediatric, neonatal, and adult cardiology publications over the past 10 years.

OBJECTIVE

Medline classifies publications as clinical trials, randomised control trials, meta-analyses, practice guidelines, reviews, case reports, editorials, and letters. We tested the hypothesis that cardiology-related publications have increased with a shift in the type of publications over the past 10 years by age category.

METHODS

To retrieve from Medline the cardiology articles, we used the keyword "heart disease", but limited the search to articles in English from 2000 to 2009. We repeated the search using one limit according to the publication type and using age tags. We used regression analysis to determine the effect of the year of publication on the number of publications of each type.

RESULTS

During the 10-year period, Medline registered 152,849 cardiology articles, doubling from 10,452 in 2000 to 20,841 in 2009, of which 8.5% were tagged as both paediatric and adult. There was a linear increase in the number over the study period in the total number of publications and in all categories, except for practice guidelines. There was almost a twofold increase in adult and neonatal articles, but ∼ 70% in paediatric articles. The rate of increase was 66% for randomised control trials, 73% for clinical trials, 124% for meta-analyses, 117% for editorials, 36% for reviews, and 103% for case reports. Practice guidelines remained very low, increasing significantly for paediatric and neonatal articles.

CONCLUSIONS

There was a substantial increase in cardiology articles over the past 10 years, being greater for adult and neonatal articles compared with paediatric articles. The increase varied according to the type of article.