Last year, in my yearly review of the 2015 issues of the European Spine Journal, I pointed out the high contribution coming from China and Korea in the increasing total number of basic and clinical articles published in the Journal during that year. This trend continued to increase in 2016, with papers coming from all parts of the world, reflecting the effects of “globalization” of our planet. An interesting study by Wei et al. [1] published in the April issue evaluated the research productivity in five leading spine journals: Spine; European Spine Journal; The Spine Journal; Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine; and Spinal Disorders and Techniques. This bibliometric analysis of a 10-year productivity in the field of spine shows a significant progression in terms of publications: compared with 856 papers published in 2004, 1628 articles were published in 2013. A similar increase in publication took place in European Spine Journal in recent years: compared with 15 papers published in the January 2007 issue, 37 were published in the January 2016 issue. Is this dramatic increase of articles for the better? Having perused all the papers published in European Spine Journal during 2016, I wonder whether the increase of the publication rate has been accompanied by a better quality of papers. An Editorial by Robert Gunzburg “Publication rates: is more better?” published in April [2], is in my opinion a good answer to my question. In other words, I subscribe to most of the reservations expressed in this Editorial.
