Trends in Pediatric Palliative Care – Visuals and Analysis of Trends: January-December 2018

By Colleen Pawliuk, MLIS

Every year we look back at the citation lists we’ve published and share our data in the hopes of informing the pediatric palliative research community about which journals are being published in most often, which authors are featured most often and the impact factors assigned to those publications.

This year we had 402 publications spread across twelve lists (including our Developing World and Oncology Lists). These included journal articles, dissertations, conference publications and editorials. From these 402 publications the majority were published in 2018.

Many of the same journals appeared in the top 10 as last year. The Journal of Pain and Symptom Management appears the most (34 times), Journal of Palliative Medicine 18 times, and Pediatrics appeared 16 times. As we included our oncology and developing world lists in this analysis, Pediatric Blood & Cancer was second most frequent (23 times). Death Studies, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine and Children (due to a special issue) all appeared in the top 10 for the first time.

Thirty-eight of the 402 publications (7%) appeared in a journal with an impact factor of 5 or higher. The journals with the highest impact factors were Journal of Clinical Oncology (26.303), Blood (15.132), Annals of Oncology (13.930), JAMA Pediatrics (10.769) and Neuro-Oncology (9.384). Click here for a data sheet of all journals and impact factors.

The most common authors were taken from a list of around 1,500 different authors. Of these authors, 17 appeared 5 or more times. The top 3 authors were Chris Feudtner (14 times), Joanne Wolfe (11 times), and Justin Baker and Boris Zernikow tied for third place each with 10.