Sir

Here I describe what I believe is the first study of the distribution of biomedical publications in Medline with respect to publishers' location. Previous studies have looked at the location of the first author, including the number of publications by country1, by US state2 or in the European Union3, normalized to population size, number of doctors in the country concerned4 or gross domestic product3.

I searched every year from 1966 to 1998, using Medline Express, selecting the field “country of publication” combined with “publication year”. I carried out this search for 194 countries. The number of publications listed in Medline increased every year: from 174,584 in 1966 to 417,944 in 1998, an average annual increase of 2.76%.

Just 12 countries (Fig. 1) each published more than 1% of the total: during 1966*–98, their combined share averaged 88.9%. Publishers from 25 other countries contributed 0.1–1%; 28 countries 0.01–0.1%; and 34 countries less than 0.01% (but more than zero).

Figure 1
figure 1

The percentage of biomedical publications in journals edited in the 12 most prolific countries from 1966 to 1998.

Full size image

Surprisingly, 95 countries failed to contribute a single article. Most of these are smaller, underdeveloped countries with low scientific output, possibly reflecting Medline's exclusion of journals published in developing countries5.

When I analysed the 12 countries in which most journals are published, four had increased their share of publications: the United States was up from 31.64% in 1966 to 46.96% in 1998; England from 9.32 to 18.46%; the Netherlands from 2.01 to 5.26%; and Denmark from 1.15 to 1.65%. Publishers from the 12 countries contributed 90.1% of the total output in 1998, compared with 86.19% in 1966.

The proportion decreased in Germany from 9.85% to 5.79%; the Soviet Union/ Russia from 8.67 to1.52%; Japan from 5.08 to 3.08%; France from 5.92 to 2.14%; Switzerland from 2.6 to 2.19%; Italy from 5.54 to 1.33%; Poland from 2.87 to 0.59%; and Canada from 1.54 to 1.13%.

* This article has been corrected. The third paragraph should have started: “Just 12 countries each published more than 1% of the total: from 1966 [not 1996] –1998 their combined share averaged 88.9%.”