Military Medicine Publications: What has Happened in the Past Two Decades?

Abstract

BackgroundMilitary medical personnel, like all other physician specialists, face the challenge of keeping updated with developments in their field of expertise, in view of the great amount of new medical information published in the literature. The availability of the Internet has triggered tremendous changes in publication characteristics, and in some fields, the number of publications has increased substantially. The emergence of electronic open access journals and the improvement in Web search engines has triggered a significant change in the publication processes and in accessibility of information.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to characterize the temporal trends in the number and types of publications in military medicine in the medical literature.MethodsWe searched all PubMed-registered publications from January 1, 1990 to December 31, 2010 using the keywords “military” or “army”. We used the publication tag in PubMed to identify and examine major publication types. The trends were tested using the Mann-Kendall test for trend.ResultsOur search yielded 44,443 publications in military medicine during the evaluation period. Overall, the number of publications showed two distinct phases over time: (1) a moderate increase from 1990 to 2001 with a mean annual increase of 2.78% (r 2=.79, P<.002), and (2) a steeper mean annual increase of 11.20% (r 2=.96, P<.002) from 2002 to 2010. Most of the examined publication types showed a similar pattern. The proportion of high-quality-of-evidence publication types (randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses) increased from 2.91% to 8.43% of the overall military medicine publications with a mean annual incremental increase of 14.20%. These publication types demonstrated a similar dual phase pattern of increase (10.01%, r 2=.80, P<.002 for 1990-2001 and 20.66%, r 2=.88, P<.002 for 2002-2010).ConclusionsWe conclude that over the past twenty years, scholarly work in the field of military medicine has shown a significant increase in volume, particularly among high quality publication types. However, practice guidelines remain rare, and meta-analyses are still limited in number.

Trends in Health Quality–Related Publications Over the Past Three Decades: Systematic Review

“…The search was conducted in April 2022. We focused on the field of health care quality in a manner similar to previous studies performed by us [ 10 ]. In order to do so, we attempted to retrieve as many health care quality–related articles as possible.…”

“…We repeated the search by each time using one limit according to publication types as classified by PubMed, and we noted the total number of publications per year for the 31 years of the specified period. As mentioned in the introduction section, we used PubMed’s own classification of articles such as relatively ‘low-evidence articles’ (eg, case reports, editorials, letters, and reviews), and higher-evidence ones (eg, clinical trials, controlled trials, randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and practice guidelines) [ 10 , 11 ]. In order to verify that the classification and tagging offered automatically by PubMed was accurate, we used a random sample of 5 articles each year, and in 100% of the cases, PubMed’s classification was accurate.…”