Authors cited in the spanish papers on digestive surgery (1991-1995)

Abstract

The references contained in the 483 surgical papers published by Revista Española de Enfermedades Digestivas (1991-1995) were analysed with the aim of identifying the scientific influences exercised on Spanish authors in digestive surgery. The authors cited were distributed in decreasing order of the number of citations. This distribution was compared with the theoretical one postulated by Lotka, and with that obtained when only the first author of the cited papers was considered. 23,326 citations to 15,886 different authors were taken from 8,125 references. The distribution of the cited authors and the number of citations per author follows the expression Ac=13931c-2.9 and the citations to the first author of the cited papers to Ac=6515.8c-3.23 . Both expressions show that there exists a wide spread of citations in authors with little influence. The high influence of Spanish authors on themselves is confirmed: the most cited author is a Spaniard, as are 3 of the 5 most cited authors and 6 of the 20 most cited authors. Seven (one of them Spanish) of these 20 authors don't have collaboration with the rest, and the other 13 are organised in five scientific teams, two of which are Spanish.