Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Apr 18:7:137-143.
doi: 10.1016/j.jdin.2022.03.006. eCollection 2022 Jun.

Trends in dermatology eponyms

Lin He  1 , Toby C Cornish  2 , Larry J Kricka  3 , Travis W Vandergriff  4 , Kim Yancey  4 , Khang Nguyen  4 , Jason Y Park  1   5
Affiliations

Trends in dermatology eponyms

Lin He et al. JAAD Int. .

Abstract

Background: Eponyms are ubiquitous in dermatology; however, their usage trends have not been studied.

Objective: To characterize the usage of eponyms in dermatology from 1880 to 2020.

Methods: Candidate eponyms were collected from a textbook and an online resource. A subset of these eponyms was deemed to be dermatology-focused by a panel of experienced dermatologists. Python scripts were used to permute eponyms into multiple variations and automatically search PubMed using BioPython's Entrez library.

Results: The dermatologist panel designated 373 of 529 candidate eponyms as dermatology-focused. These eponyms were permuted into 3159 variations and searched in PubMed. The highest occurring dermatology-focused eponyms (DFEs) in the year 2020 included Leishmania, Behçet syndrome, Kaposi sarcoma, Langerhans cell histiocytosis, and Mohs surgery. Increased DFE usage in the general medical literature parallels the overall increase in the use of other eponyms in the medical literature. However, in the most cited dermatology journals, DFE usage did not increase in the past decade. There were several eponyms with decreased usage.

Limitations: This study is limited to the publications in PubMed; only titles and abstracts could be queried.

Conclusion: DFEs are increasing in usage in the general medical literature, but the usage of eponyms in the most cited dermatology journals has plateaued.

Keywords: BioPython; DFE, dermatology-focused eponyms; PubMed; citation; dermatology; eponym.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Dr Park is on the scientific advisory board of HU Group (Tokyo, Japan; formerly known as Miraca Holdings); subsidiaries of HU Group include Baylor Genetics Laboratory, Fujirebio Inc, and SRL Labs.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Flowchart of eponym identification. An initial set of 529 eponyms were collected from several source materials. A subset of 373 was deemed to be dermatology-focused by a panel of experienced dermatologists. Variations in these eponyms were permuted into multiple forms, resulting in 3173 terms which were then searched in PubMed via BioPython. A total of 174,578 citations were identified among more than 30 million journal articles in PubMed. The eponyms are cited in 7711 journals.
Fig 2
Fig 2
A, Citations of dermatology-focused eponyms (DFEs) compared with all citations. In PubMed, the overall trend for citations with DFEs (black line) is comparable to the total number of citations of all medical articles (red line). B, In comparison, the trend of DFEs in a subset of 5 dermatology journals (black solid line) with the highest impact factor, shows no growth in the past decade and is decreasing compared with the total number of citations from these 5 journals (red solid line).
Fig 3
Fig 3
Eponyms with the most dynamic change over time. Eponyms with the greatest percentage increase (A), and eponyms with the greatest percentage decrease (B) in PubMed citations from 1940 through 2020. The lines depict the 5-year moving average of the annual PubMed citation indicated by the barplots. Note that the search terms for “Mohs surgery” include other variants such as “Mohs micrographic surgery,” “Mohs cancer resection,” “Mohs excision,” and “Mohs cancer excision.” DFE, Dermatology-focused eponym.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Goodman H. Eponyms of dermatology. Arch Dermatol Syphilol. 1924;9:675–737.
    1. Scott T.D. What’s in a name? Eponyms in dermatology. J Dermatol Nurses Assoc. 2011;3:300.
    1. Jana N., Barik S., Arora N. Current use of medical eponyms—a need for global uniformity in scientific publications. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2009;9:18. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-9-18. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Panush R.S., Wallace D.J., REN Dorff, Engleman E.P. Retraction of the suggestion to use the term “Reiter’s syndrome” sixty-five years later: the legacy of Reiter, a war criminal, should not be eponymic honor but rather condemnation. Arthritis Rheum. 2007;56:693–694. - PubMed
    1. Adamson A.S., Lipoff J.B. Reconsidering named honorifics in medicine-the troubling legacy of dermatologist Albert Kligman. JAMA Dermatol. 2021;157:153–155. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources