Estudio bibliométrico de artículos de casuística publicados en la Revista Española de Patología, 2005-2009

Bibliometric studies provide information about the status of a particular area of research.The present study examined the sources of reference of casuistic articles published in the Spanish Journal of Pathology between 2005 and 2009. The following indicators were evaluated: authors and collaborators, article category, year of publication and source, Bradford distribution, obsolescence index, Price index, language and insularity index. 120 articles from 5 editions of the journal were studied. The average number of authors per article was 4.22 and the average number of citations 13.96, the majority of which were taken from scientific journals. The authors tended to refer to recent publications, predominantly in English, with 9 journals being cited most frequently; the inslularity index was 8.92%. Although this pattern coincides with bibliometric studies of other Spanish journals, some unexpected charactistics were found which should be analyzed further in the future. The overall conclusion is that authors of casuistic articles in the Spanish Journal of Pathology make use of recent publications, mainly from North American and English journals.