Temporal Trends in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Publications Over A 19 - Years Period

Objective: To determine whether temporal changes occurred in the the pediatric versus adult inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), both in terms of number and type of yearly published articles.
Design: We aimed to evaluate as many as possible PubMed-registered articles related to the field of IBD. We thus used the following Internet address: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez and searched for articles registered from 1/1/1993 and until 12/31/2011 using the keywords "inflammatory bowel disease" or "Crohn disease" or "Ulcerative Colitis" or "undetermined Colitis". We specifically studied randomized controlled trials (RCT), clinical trials (CT), case reports, metaanalyses, letters to the editor, reviews, systematic reviews, practice guidelines, and editorials.
Results: We identified 44,645 articles over the 19 year-period. There were 8,687 pediatric-tagged articles versus 19,750 adult-tagged articles. Thus 16,208 articles were unaccounted for, and represent articles not assigned a "pediatric" or "adult" tag by PubMed.  There was an approximately 3-fold significant increase in all articles recorded both in pediatric and adult articles. This significant increase was true for nearly every category of article but the number of clinical trials , metaanalyses, and randomized controlled trials increased proportionally more than the number of "lower quality" articles such as editorials or letters to the editor. Very few guidelines were published every year.
Conclusions:  There is a linear increase in the number of yearly publications related to the field of IBD. This increase is significant in terms of the amount of time that a clinician may invest in his/her continuing education through the reading of IBD-specific literature. However, it appears that there are more of clinical trials and higher quality articles. We suggest that a concerted effort should be undertaken by professional societies related to IBD in order to produce more guidelines.