Characteristics and trends of research on positron emission tomography: a bibliometric analysis, 2002-2012

We performed a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications focused on positron emission tomography (PET) over a 10-year period. The MEDLINE and ISI Web of Knowledge databases were searched for English language original articles focused on PET in SCI/SCIE-indexed journals in 2002, 2007, and 2012. We selected the documents with titles that included "PET" or "positron emission." The following information was obtained from each article: journal (year of publication, title, subject category, and impact factor), subspecialty, imaging modality used, tracer, species, sample size, number of authors, affiliation of the first author, declared funding, and country of origin. The yearly publication on PET increased from 547 (2002) to 986 (2007), and 1838 (2012). A total of 1753 (52.0 %) articles were published in journals in the "Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging" category, 1512 (44.9 %) were in the subspecialty of oncology, 3245 (96.3 %) used PET or PET/CT, 1698 (50.4 %) used 2-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose (FDG) as the radiotracer, 2378 (70.5 %) were human studies, 1294 (38.4 %) had a sample size of < 20, 1674 (49.7 %) had > 7 authors, 779 (23.1 %) were written by a first author from a department of nuclear medicine, and 1337 (39.7 %) were supported by government funding. The United States published 948 studies (28.1 %) followed by Japan (345, 10.2 %) and Germany (335, 9.9 %). In the time trend analysis oncology subspecialty, PET/MR as the imaging modality, FDG as the tracer, sample size > 50, number of authors > 7, radiology department affiliation of the first author, and government funding exhibited significantly positive trends. The number of publication concerning PET has increased rapidly over the last decade. This bibliometric analysis revealed characteristics and trends of current PET research that provides useful information to researchers.