ABSTRACT
Motivated by the 150-year anniversary of the Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology in 2023, we studied the bibliometric development of the journal. We evaluated data from Editorial Reports, Clarivate, and Springer Nature databases. Several parameters representing the journal's performance, such as the impact factor and social impact, were analyzed over the years. We analyzed the journal's meta-data and wrote an algorithm to retrieve cities and countries of origin. We could see a decrease in publications from Germany and an increase in papers from Brazil, China, Egypt, and Iran during the last years. The decrease in publications from Germany is probably a zeitgeist effect because this country places a strong emphasis on high-impact factor papers for academic promotion and winning grants. Germany was the country with the most publications throughout the 100 most-cited articles. Most of these articles were published between 1970 and 1990, when neurotransmitters were the most published topic. Klaus Starke (Freiburg) and Manfred Göthert (Bonn) were prominent drivers of this field. The most common topics nowadays are "Drugs for the Treatment of Malignant Tumor Diseases" and "Immunopharmacology." The internationality of the journal substantially increased after introduction of English as mandatory language in the 1970s. The journal also experienced substantial COVID-19 pandemic-related effects. This paper is not only of relevance for the field of pharmacology but for science in general in the sense that Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology is a case study for profound changes in a traditional scientific journal, requiring permanent adjustment by editors, referees, publisher, authors, and readers alike. The development of the journal has been strongly influenced by historic and political developments, cultural attitudes (zeitgeist), language changes, global changes in research topics, and eminent individuals who published many papers in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Neoplasms , Humans , Pandemics , Germany , BibliometricsABSTRACT
Motivated by the worldwide debate on gender equality, we analyzed the gender structure of the authors and the editorial board of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. We wrote an algorithm to assign authors' first names to a gender to determine the gender distribution of publications. We evaluated publications from German research institutes from 2000 to 2020. This resulted in a data set of 2929 authors. We could assign a first name to almost all authors. The percentage of female authors increased until 2008, but thereafter stagnated at around 30%. The position of senior author is far less often held by women (around 15%). Even though multiple political measures were implemented to increase the female participation, our analysis has shown no increase regardless. We also observed a strong decrease in German authorship (both male and female) since 2000. In the editorial board and for advisory editors, there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of women since 2016 as the result of appointments by the editor-in-chief. We discuss the strengths and limitations of our study in context with the literature and current developments in society and science and methodological pitfalls of studies in this field. More research is required to obtain a full picture of gender structure in science and to be able to properly interpret the data.
