Abstract

As the prevalence of urolithiasis is growing and there has been an increase in technologies and minimally invasive techniques in all areas of surgery, it would be expected that the total number of publications about this disease should increase. We hypothesized if there is also an evident trend towards the increase of urolithiasis related publications in urology journals. We evaluated the publications in five prestigious urology journals over the last decade, in order to perform a bibliometric analysis of every article published related to urinary lithiasis. An electronic search was performed using PubMed and all issues of British Journal of Urology International® (BJU Int), European Urology® (Eur Urol), Journal of Endourology® (J Endourol), Journal of Urology® (J Urol) and Urology® (Urology) were consulted from 2001 to 2010. All articles related to renal and ureteral lithiasis were collected, recorded and analyzed. A total of 30, 847 articles were published in these five prestigious journals. The J Urol was the journal with the most number of articles published per year with an average of 1146 papers. J Endourol was the publication with less publicated articles in this decade, with an average of 231 papers per year. There was a total of 1425 urolithiasis related papers in all journals. The J Endourol was the journal with the greatest number of urolithiasis related articles published in the period of analysis, with a total of 545 articles. The ratio of urolithiasis related articles and the total articles published per year in each journal was analyzed. The J Endourol was the publication with the greatest ratio. Eur Urol was the journal with less publications in urolithiasis, with ratios ranging from 0 in the year of 2010 and 5.3% in the year of 2003, with a decrease in the last years. All the other journals maintained a stable ratio of publications. Urolithiasis as a great subject to urologists practice would be expected to be an important source of original research studies in the more active urology journals. However, our study showed that, during the last decade, there was a steady number of urolithiasis related articles published in several journals.