Publication Trends in Pediatrics in the Field of Neonatology: A Review of its First Half Century ♦ 1932

In connection with the 50th anniversary of Pediatrics, we created a database to analyze the relative contributions in neonatology, and major subdisciplines. The database was created by direct data entry (1948-65), and downloading from PubMed (1966-97). There were 14,480 original articles; 37% (5308) were judged to be neonatal. The table below lists the percent of articles in 10 subdisciplines by decade. The predominance of N/M/E and H/J in the first two decades reflect an early focus on such problems as feeding, hypoglycemia, hypocalcemia and erythroblastosis. HSR was initially a major component, and has returned to the forefront in 1988-97. N/D/B and RESP have steadily risen to their current levels of interest. We have also used the database to identify landmark publications which helped to reduce infant and neonatal mortality rates over the past 50 years: exchange transfusion, infection control (1948-57), neutral thermal environment, regulation of metabolism, amniocentesis/fetal transfusion, (1958-67), antenatal steroids, NCPAP, apnea therapy (1968-77), surfactant, HFV, cryotherapy (1978-87), inhaled NO, erythropoietin and sleep position(1988-97).

Table 1 No caption available.