What is hot in infectious diseases?

Paper citation is currently the only way to evaluate what is ‘hot’ in international literature. To evaluate this using adapted keywords, we retrieved all articles, in early May 2015, that were cited more than 100 times according to ISI from Thomson Reuters, in infectious disease. We selected articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association as the most cited medical journals and from the Lancet Infectious Disease, Clinical Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology and Infections from the years 2012 and 2013, as the three, broad-spectrum, most cited, infectious diseases journals. During these years, more than 100 000 papers on infectious diseases were recorded in ISI, of which 200 were cited more than 100 times (0.2%). Among the three big medical journals, the citation rate (for all articles and reviews) was higher in the New England Journal of Medicine with average citation rate of 97, with 234 papers above 100 citations of which 27 were from infectious diseases (4% of papers published in the journal). For the Lancet 133 papers were recorded, 15 of which were from our field (1% of published papers), compared with 51 with four from our field in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Indeed, the New England Journal of Medicine for these 2 years published significantly more highly cited papers in our field. As for the infectious diseases journals, Lancet Infectious Disease did better: 12 (7%) of its articles reached 100 citations, nearly as many as the Lancet, its mother journal; Clinical Infectious Diseases had six articles and Clinical Microbiology and Infection had four and they were comparable within the infectious diseases field (see Table 1 ).

Table 1.

Highly cited papers (>100 citations) from 2012 and 2013 in infectious diseases

2012/2013	N Engl J Med	Lancet	JAMA	JID	CID	CMI	Total		ISI
Number articles/reviews	709	1600	1230	164	955	556	5214		>100.00
H factor	141	114	481	44	48	31
Number of citations in 2015 per papers (Infect Dis/Med Microbiol)	97	30	25	40	17	11
Articles cited >100 times	234 (33%)	133 (8%)	51 (4%)	12 (7%)	6 (0,6%)	4 (0,7%)			200 (0.2%)
Malaria	0	2	0	0	0	0	2 (3%)	30%	5 (2.5%)
Tuberculosis	3	0	0	2	1	0	6 (9%)		13 (6.5%)
HIV	5	4	1	2	0	0	11 (17%)		35 (17.5%)
Hepatitis	4	1	1	0	0	0	5	8%	26 (13%)
H7 N9	3	3	0	0	0	0	8	13%	9 (4.5%)
MERS coronavirus	1	0	0	1	0	0
Resistance to antibiotics + Neo antibiotics	0	1	0	3	4	2	10	16%	26 (13%)
Vaccines	3	0	0	2	0	0	5	8%	14 (7%)
Mycology	0	0	0	0	1	1	2	3%	11 (5.5%)
Microbiota	2	0	1	0	0	1	3	5%	70 (35%)
Total >100 Infect. Dis.; p < 0.001	27 (4%)	15 (1%)	4 (0.4%)	12 (7%)	6 (0.6%)	4(0.7%)	64		200 (1.2%)

H7N9, avian influenza virus H7N9; HIV, human immunodeficiency virus; MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome; N Engl J Med, The New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association; JID, The Journal of Infectious Diseases; CID, Clinical Infectious Disease; CMI, Clinical Microbiology and Infections.

Three major points emerged. First, the microbiota in the international literature reach 35% of most cited papers but its appearance is negligible in infectious diseases journals and the best medical journals. In Clinical Microbiology and Infection, edited by F. Baquero, we published a supplementary issue [1] and I edited a themed issue [2] to emphasize this field. It is rapidly growing with most highly cited papers being issued from the Nature group (29) and Science (13), but this subject is sadly escaping the infectious disease and general medical literature. In contrast, attention paid to rare and regional diseases such as avian influenza virus H7N9 or Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus was very low in infectious diseases journals but high in the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. We recently reported on the disproportion of highly cited papers on regional diseases in leading journals, not being practical when considering their readership as doctors [3]. Finally, antibiotic resistance and evaluation of treatments and new antibiotic compounds are comparable in the journal literature (13%) and in infectious disease journals (16%) but are neglected in leading medical journals (2%). The ‘big three’ diseases (tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus infection and malaria) are equally published (30% in all sources), although malaria is neglected, considering the fatalities that it causes in the world. Finally, pneumonia (besides rare emerging viruses) and diarrhoeas are the more neglected field in all journals when considering their occurrence.