Publication performance of university orthopedic trauma surgery in Germany

Background One of the performance criteria of a university hospital is its publication activities. The aim of this bibliometric study was a comparative benchmarking of the publication activities of German orthopedic trauma surgery university hospitals. Material and methods The publication performance of the leading groups, consisting of chief and senior physicians, section and division heads of 39 German orthopedic trauma surgery university hospitals, was recorded over a period of 10 years (1 January 2010-31 December 2019). All publications that were listed in PubMed and for which the appropriate persons were first or last author were considered. In addition, the impact factor (IF) was determined. Results A total of 4438 publications were recorded published by 381 surgeons. The share of publishing authors was 72.8%. The articles were published in 545 journals. The average IF of all publications was 1.81. The publication activities of hospitals showed a wide range, this applied to both the number of publications and the IF generated by the individual author. The publication activity ranged from an average of 16.4 publications per author in the top-ranked hospital to 1.5 publications in the last-placed hospital. The same result was seen with the total IFs. In the highest ranking hospital according to this criterion the individual surgeon achieved on average of 42.1 cumulative IFs compared with 1.7 IFs in the last placed hospital. Conclusion The publication performance of German orthopedic trauma surgery university hospitals showed a high variance, as was also found in other disciplines. The causes must remain open, but a different research motivation cannot be ruled out.