Global Contributions and Trends in Research within the Top-ranked Plastic Surgery Journal

BACKGROUND: We aimed to longitudinally study the relative research contributions of US and international plastic surgeons by evaluating publications within the premier plastic surgery journal over the last 2 decades. We hypothesized that even with an increased pressure to publish in this journal, the relative research contributions from American plastic surgeons will continue to be the largest overall and in all subspecialties. METHODS: Data for the surgical subspecialty, corresponding author’s country of origin, and region were extracted from all original articles in 2 randomly selected monthly issues of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery (PRS) from the last 2 decades to evaluate longitudinal trends. Data were also extracted from all of the original articles published in PRS for the last 3 years to analyze the recent distribution of research output. RESULTS: During the last 2 decades, the relative proportion of total original articles written by US authors has increased. They have published proportionally more articles in the Reconstructive and Breast field while publishing relatively less in the hand/peripheral nerve field. From the first decade of analysis, US authors wrote relatively fewer articles in the hand/peripheral nerve field, whereas in the second decade, the US authors wrote relatively fewer articles in the Experimental field. In the last 3 years, US authors published relatively fewer articles in the Experimental and Cosmetic fields. CONCLUSIONS: Each country’s scientific productivity in PRS is related to funding, interest, patients’ demand, and healthcare market pressure. In this study, we see that these factors influence trends within research publications over the last 2 decades.