Authorship analysis of publications in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (1969-2024)

Abstract

Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (NSAP) is the world's oldest journal in the field of pharmacology. Approximately fourteen bibliometric studies published by NSAP have examined its scholarly trajectory and role in pharmacology. However, no study has yet thoroughly analyzed author contributions throughout the journal's recent history. This study addresses the gap by analyzing all publications in NSAP from 1969-onward using data retrieved from the Scopus database. The dataset included bibliographic information such as titles, author names, affiliations, years of publication, and document types. During this period, NSAP published 13,422 documents-comprising 12,687 original articles and 735 reviews-with an annual publication growth rate of 2.74% and an average document age of 31.2 years. These publications received 252,490 citations, yielding an average of 18.81 citations per document. The top three most productive authors (based on number of publications) were Starke, K. (143 publications), Göthert, M. (106), and Seifert, R. (101). This ranking was consistent across three independent tools-VOSviewer, R Studio, and Scopus-reinforcing the accuracy of manual verification. A total of 14 authors were identified with at least 50 publications each. For this select group, detailed performance indicators were calculated. These indicators allowed for a multi-dimensional evaluation of author performance beyond simple publication counts. Precisely, we provided number of publications, total citations, citations per publication, h-index, g-index, m-index, HG composite index, Q2 index, and year of first publication for the 50 authors. In fact, the publication data for 23,476 authors are presented in supplementary Table 1 along with the stated indicators. This study highlights the extent of author involvement with NSAP and emphasizes the importance of using various tools and measures to gain a fuller understanding of academic productivity.

Keywords: All authors; NSAP; Performance indicators; Total publications.