Last five years audit of Journal of Clinical Orthopaedics and Trauma (JCOT) - A scientometric analysis

BackgroundWe have studied the growth of Journal of Clinical Orthopaedics and Trauma (JCOT), the official journal of the Delhi Orthopaedic Association indexed in PubMed, Scopus and Embase, along with an analysis of citation trends and levels of evidence of published articles in the last five years.MethodsSCOPUS and PubMed databases (2015–19) were used to extract publication-related data for the last five years. The official website of the journal was also used to retrieve issue-specific data. An audit of recent publications in the JCOT was conducted focusing on number of issues and publications(year wise), types of articles published, review speed, level of evidence of publications, types of publication(speciality wise), number of publications in PubMed and SCOPUS, number of citations(year wise), national and international authorship and the Cite Scores.ResultsThe submissions were increased by 2.8 times and the citations rocketed to 16.6 times in 2019, compared to 2015. A total of 890 papers were there and the journal was cited 1702 times in the last five years. More articles with higher levels of evidence papers are now being published.ConclusionThere has been a significant increase in the numbers of submissions, publications, citations, Cite Score, h-index and contribution by the International authors. Its Editorial efficiency has also been outstanding with timely reviews and editorial decisions. The JCOT has become increasingly internationally relevant in the last five years, in the orthopaedic community. However, JCOT needs to publish more papers with a higher level of evidence like Systematic reviews, Meta-analyses, Randomized Controlled Trials and should only publish top-class lower hierarchy papers (like Case reports, Case-controlled and Retrospective studies).