[Analysis of articles and citations of Chinese Journal of Pediatrics from 1950 to 2009].

OBJECTIVE: To explore the articles, authors and citations of the articles published in Chinese Journal of Pediatrics, and have a clear view of the characteristics of this journal in its different development stages.

METHOD: Bibliometric methods were used to analyze the published articles, cooperation, regional distribution, core authors, corresponding authors and high-quantities of publication institutes, and also to calculate the number of citations per paper, types of citations, language-based citation number, Price index, self-cited rate and the distribution of journals based on citations.

RESULT: Totally 5534 academic articles were published during the 60 years, of which the number of articles written by more than one author was 4669 (80.71%), with a degree of collaboration as 3.87, and a rate of collaboration as 84.37%. The number of articles by a single author was 865 (19.29%). As for the regions from where the papers were submitted, the top one was Beijing, which had 1495 articles published (27.01%). The top 15 institutes in number of articles had published 2254 articles (40.73%). The average citation rate was 84.15%, and the number of citations was 48 854. The number of citations per paper was 10.06, the Price index and self-cited rate were 55.57% and 6.12%, respectively. The number of citations from foreign language literature was 35 781 (69.1%). The citation number of journals was 43 266 (84.5%), which is markedly higher than the citations of books and others.

CONCLUSION: Chinese Journal of Pediatrics has a wide distribution of authors and a high cooperative rate. This journal has a group of high-level core authors since founded in 1950, and it shows an adequate ability of absorbing and using scientific information. The articles published in this journal not only objectively reflected the distribution of the research powers, but also the development status of pediatrics in our country.