Welcome to Medline (PubMed) trend

This page displays the number of entries (articles) in PubMed (Medline) published every year (having the 'DP', date of publication, field set to that year), that conform to search strategy (such as a phrase) you enter below:

It may take about 30 seconds to retrieve and build a trend.

The first column will be the number of papers in each year, the second column--the year, and the third column the number of papers per 100,000 in the medline database in that year.

Also, please note that statistics for the last year may be inaccurate as PubMed may still be indexing titles during the first part of the current year. For many purposes, it is safest to only consider numbers found until two years ago (for example, in 2014, only consider numbers until 2012).

NEW! Spatial trends (counts by country names) NEW! (since dec 2012)

Yearly trends in papers indexed by PubMed, by country and language

Examples of usage
  • To find out just how many papers have been indexed by PubMed every year, enter an empty query (simply press 'Build Trend');
  • To find the history of a subject, enter a few keywords describing the subject. For example, clopidogrel will tell you that discussion about this drug first appeared in 1987, was ocasional (under one paper a month) by 1996 and really took off in after 2000;
  • To make statistics of the languages of papers as indexed by PubMed and how they evolved in time enter something like fre[la] and you will see their number is geting reduced in time, despite the increase in the general number of papers, so the prevalence of papers in french in the database falls from about 10%, forty years ago, to less than 2% in 2004;
  • To see how many papers have been published in journals published in a given country year by year enter something like france[pl] and one can see that the number of biomedical papers published in France, indexed in Medline, is quite constant over the years, despite the previous statistics;
  • queries can be combined, for example:
    eng[la] france[pl]
    and you will see that a progressive number of papers published in france, but in english, are indexed by PubMed every year;
  • trying pitie-salpetriere[ad] will show you that, while the number of papers published from this famous hospital is increasing yearly, the fraction of these papers from all papers in PubMed in the respective year is relatively constant.

WARNING: Counting papers with a given feature is a very gross bibliometric method. Sometimes, the results are relevant, sometimes they require extensive checking, but they must always be interpreted very carefully.

Cite this page as: Alexandru Dan Corlan. Medline trend: automated yearly statistics of PubMed results for any query, 2004. Web resource at URL:http://dan.corlan.net/medline-trend.html. Accessed: 2012-02-14. (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/65RkD48SV)