Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: I n my last commentary, 1 I highlighted the emerging discipline of hepatobiliary oncology and noted that HEPATOLOGY encouraged submission of excellent papers on hepatocellular cancer (HCC).Our collective goal was to highlight HEPATOLOGY as a forum for communicating advances in HCC.In this commentary, I will explore this latter concept in greater detail.Have we achieved our goal?Has HEPATOLOGY become a home for outstanding clinical, translational, and basic research on this enigmatic, devastating malignancy?On February 9, 2009, I examined the number of papers published in biomedical journals.I performed a PubMed search for hepatocellular carcinoma with various limits.The number of publications generated by PubMed was then taken as the total for the defined parameters.I made no attempt to verify the results by reading titles and/or abstracts.Also, all publications were considered to be equal numerically whether they were peer-reviewed original papers, reviews, letters to the editor, discussions in Hepatology Elsewhere, or other types of publications.Thus, in this respect, the data are unexpurgated.Because the defined parameters are the same for each time period and journal, the data are unbiased and useful for tracking trends or qualitative comparisons.Others may want a more refined analysis, but this more superficial approach does permit an initial exploration of the aforementioned questions.What did I learn from this exercise?First, my search suggested that approximately 2934 publications on HCC were published in the last 12 months, a staggering number of publications, suggesting immense worldwide interest in hepatocellular carcinoma.Obviously, no single journal should or could publish all these manuscripts.For example, HEPATOLOGY published 349 papers in 2008, or approximately 30 per month.For HEPATOLOGY to publish all of these HCC publications, there would need to be 100 issues pub-
Source: Hepatology
DOI: 10.1002/hep.22943
Author: Gregory J. Gores
Institution: Mayo Clinic
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2089325812