Article Impact and the International Publishing Landscape in Foot and Ankle Research

CATEGORY: Other INTRODUCTION/PURPOSE: In recent years, digital publishing and indexing have accelerated the pace of collaboration in foot and ankle (FA) research. As journals become more electronically accessible, authors have greater opportunity to submit to journals that are most appropriate for their work and relevant to the global community. While previous studies have reported general publishing trends in FA research, there is little information available on which topics and authorship practices bring the greatest value to the orthopaedic community. The goal of this study is to investigate global and journal-specific factors associated with high- impact FA research, including sub-topics and collaboration trends. METHODS: We examined 43 orthopedic journals, including FA-specific journals, general orthopedic journals, and sports medicine journals. We utilized the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE database for general article information, and Web of Science's (WOS) Journal Citation Report for citation counts. All 43 journals were indexed in both MEDLINE and WOS. We categorized articles as FA-specific using a keyword search. To measure the impact factor of a journal, we calculated a 5-year 'impact factor' following modified WOS guidelines (Total citations in 2020 for articles published 2015-2019 / total publications from 2015-2019). To measure individual 'article impact', we calculated the average citations/year for that article following publication. Only articles published in the last five years were included for each topic to ensure all article averages are current. Other variables, such as publishing nationality, number of authors, and article type were collected using MEDLINE article metadata and keyword searches. RESULTS: A total of 7,679 FA-specific articles published in 43 journals were included for analysis. Globally, US authors publish the greatest number of first-author FA articles (32%, Figure 1a), followed by the UK (8%), China (6%), and South Korea (5%). Author nation of origin varies considerably by journal; FAI is composed of 53% American first-authors, while 13% of articles from the international journal KSSTA feature American first-authors. Article impact also varies considerably by topic (Figure 1b). Sports- related FA articles, for example, outperform the average FA article in citations/year (2.27 vs. 1.69, p < 0.0001), while deformity- related articles underperform the FA average (1.25, p < 0.0001). The number of authors has a strong positive correlation with article impact (r = 0.88, Figure 1c). CONCLUSION: A clear understanding of publication trends in the literature allows authors to select the most appropriate journal readership for their work. American authors are global leaders in FA publications, and primarily publish in American journals. We found that many factors, including article sub-topic and authorship group size, influence article impact and journal impact factor. These findings raise opportunities for collaboration, research focus and journal selection. Monitoring publication trends allows authors and journal editors to more accurately predict high-impact areas of research, and to identify potentially under- represented fields needing greater attention and investigation.