Figure 5. Representation of MeSH disease categories in high-impact journals.

Each 'radar plot' indicates the relative extent of representation of the indicated medical subject heading (MeSH) in six journals: Nature, Science, Cell, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Lancet. Journals are oriented around the hexagons according to the key (bottom right), with basic-science journals at the top and medical journals at the bottom. Values on each axis represent the proportion of the given disease area relative to the overall number of disease-related articles in that journal. The outer edge of each hexagon frame represents 25% of disease-related articles, and the axes are scaled by the square roots of the fractions so that the areas of the polygons approximate the overall counts. The nested irregular polygons represent cumulative contributions of successive 5-year spans, as indicated in the key, so that widths of colour bands reflect the relative contributions for those periods. The superimposed dotted hexagons show the percentage represented by that disease area in the entire disease-related scientific literature for the overall period. ENT, ear, nose and throat.