Pediatric burns research: A history or an evolution?

• Pediatric burns research has become a subspecialty in its own right.
• There are no dedicated pediatric burns journals.
• Historically, pediatric burns research was published in a wide variety of journals.
• Significantly more pediatric burns research has been published in recent years.
• Two burns journals have consolidated 37% of the published pediatric burns research.

Background/purposePediatric burns research has increasingly been recognized as a sub-specialty of its own. The aim of this study was to assess and analyze the publication patterns of the pediatric burns literature over the last six decades.MethodsA search strategy for the Web of Science database was designed for pediatric burns publications, with output analyzed between two periods: 1945–1999 (period 1) and 2000–2013 (period 2).ResultsThere were 1133 and 1194 publications for periods 1 (1945–1999) and 2 (2000–2013), respectively. The mean citation counts of the top 50 publications were 77 (range 45–278) and 49 (range 33–145) for periods 1 and 2, respectively. There were 26 and 20 authors with two or more publications in the top 50 list in periods 1 and 2, respectively. Of these there are two authors that have published 47 papers in both combined time-periods. There were 29 and 9 journals that have published 50% of the publications for time-period 1 and 2 respectively. In period 2, there were two burns journals that have published 37.2% of the total articles.ConclusionsPediatric burns research has evolved from an associated, dispersed entity into a consolidated sub-specialty that has been successfully integrated into mainstream burns journals.