The numbers games

Excerpt

In 1979 Allan M. Cormack and Godfrey N. Hounsfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine “for the development of computer assisted tomography”. By this time, Hounsfield had published eight papers in medical journals, his seminal works in the British Journal of Radiology. The second and, thus far, last Nobel Prize awarded for medical imaging went to Paul C. Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, belatedly, in 2003 “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging”. Fourteen of Mansfield’s works, including his most important, had also appeared in the British Journal of Radiology. (He published twice in Pediatric Radiology [1, 2]). This year medical journals are expected to publish almost six times the number of radiology-related articles compared with the Nobel year 1979 and about twice as many as in 2003 (Fig. 1). At least part of this publishing explosion must be explained by increased scientific activity. Witnessing such an unprecedented increase in productivity begs two questions: Where is the big discovery that will launch the next transformation of medical imaging? Or is there perhaps no direct link between article output and scientific impact?

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