Bibliometric report of authorship trends in a professional journal- An update

Abstract

Background: With rising trends in research and scientific writing, various ethical organizations have been vigilant over developing rigorous authorship criteria. There may be times, when authors tend to publish more due to their seniority or previously earned credit for former publications, proving the existence of Matthew effect in scientific research. It indicates that the majority of publications in a field are contributed by smaller number of authors. It was hypothesized that the Matthew effect may be still applicable for scientific work published by Indian pediatric dentists in the official Journal of Indian Society of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry (JISPPD) from 2015 to 2019. Methodology: To assess the number of times each author has published in the official Journal of Indian Society of Pedodontics and Preventive Dentistry, we downloaded all issues for the 5-year period from the journal website. Full names of all authors were entered year-wise in Microsoft Excel 2007 and descriptive statistics were used for finding out contribution percentages. Results: A total of 372 papers were published during the study period by 1148 authors. About 82% had at least one publication, followed by 12% publishing at least two papers; only 1% of the total authors had contributed to more than five publications. The result showed the absence of Matthew effect for publications in the JISPPD. Conclusion: The final results of the study did not show any presence of Matthew effect among authorship in the JISPPD.