Where Do DPMs Publish?: A Bibliometric Inquiry Into 2019

Regardless of specific specialty, producing meaningful literature is crucial to the advancement of the medical profession. The importance lies in confirming established diagnostic and treatment protocols, as well as pushing knowledge boundaries forward with new and developing techniques. It is also clearly an important aspect of medical education, as evidenced by the Council of Podiatric Medical Education (CPME) requirement for residency programs to hold at least monthly journal reviews and provide instruction in research methodology.¹ As Doctors of Podiatric Medicine (DPMs), we are profession proudly active in scientific inquiry and should continue to do so.^2-5

With that said, podiatric medicine and surgery is also a broad profession with any number of potential subspecialties, niches, and available areas of interest. This might mean that podiatric scientists similarly look to publish in a relatively wide number of arenas, depending on the specific hypothesis. Although a number of bibliometric analyses of foot and ankle topics exist,^4,6-9 we are unaware of any attempt at a scientometric analysis of the profession as a whole. Therefore, we set about to generate a list of the number of DPM authors who published an indexed article in 2019, as well as a list of the number of journals publishing an article by a DPM author or authors.

How We Conducted Our Inquiry

This turned out to be a relatively challenging proposition, as the search engines of the indexed medical literature we identified did not allow for searches by author degree. Further, we found that some journals do not specifically report author degrees, and instead only list professional titles and affiliation locations. Consequently, we primarily utilized the Scopus^® database, which does allow for a search by the author affiliation line. We searched within a time frame of January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019 for authors and affiliations that included the phrases: “foot;” “ankle;” “podiatry;” “podiatric;” or “DPM”. This admittedly might have inadvertently excluded any DPM who works within a “Department of Surgery” or “Department of Orthopedics,” and who published an article in a journal that does not publish author degrees, but we think this occurrence is relatively rare.

This search yielded a total of 995 articles. A manual examination of each of these articles then determined if at least one of the authors was a United States DPM. In other words, we excluded articles authored exclusively by MD, DO, or podiatric equivalent degrees from other countries. Sometimes this was readily evident based on the listed degrees of the authors in the manuscript. Other times it was apparent that all authors were from outside of the United States. Occasionally a basic Google search determined more information about individual author(s).

We also performed a manual search of what we thought were the most common foot and ankle journals to include: the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery^®; Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association; Foot and Ankle International; Foot and Ankle Specialist; Foot and Ankle Surgery; Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery; Journal of Foot and Ankle Research; Foot and Ankle Clinics; Clinics in Podiatric Medicine and Surgery; The Foot; and Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research.   

Once complete, we cross referenced the lists with elimination of any duplicate articles and authors to ascertain the absolute number of articles and authors. In other words, we counted all unique articles only once, regardless of the number of DPM authors.

What Our Inquiry Revealed

Our searches eventually identified 255 articles published by 472 unique DPM authors within 58 different journals.  See the table entries above for a complete listing of the journals including the number of articles per journal. The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery^® (n=81 articles; 31.8%), Clinics in Podiatric Medicine and Surgery (n=42 articles; 16.5%), Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association (n=40 articles; 15.7%), The Foot (n=11 articles; 4.3%), and Foot and Ankle International (n=9 articles; 3.5%) had the greatest volume of publications.

We recognize the potential difficulty in interpreting these results in isolation. In other words, it is unclear how the numbers might compare to other specialties, as this is effectively unknown. But, at the very least, it does provide a baseline for the podiatric profession, and seems to indicate that we produce a substantial amount of scientific literature and publish across a variety of journals. While most of these publications are within foot and ankle-specific journals, many publications appeared within other specialty journals including the Journal of Vascular Surgery, Journal of Diabetes Research, and the International Wound Journal. This variety might be unique, and continued encouragement could help foster the relationship that DPMs have with other fields.

We hope that these findings encourage our profession’s continued dedication to scientific inquiry and submission to a variety of journals, while inspiring new investigators. Continued growth in research will only work to enhance our own knowledge base, enabling us to deliver superior care and positively impacting the lives of our patients.

Dr. Sanosti is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Departments of Surgery and Podiatric Biomechanics at Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine in Philadelphia.

Dr. Meyr is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery at Temple University School Podiatric Medicine in Philadelphia.