Bibliographic references of the articles of the Boletín de Pediatría: why don't we cite our colleagues?

Abstract

Objective: To know the most important characteristics of the Boletín de Pediatría bibliographic references.
Material and methods: Review of 2005 to 2008 Boletín de Pediatría bibliographic references, without supplements. We studied: total reference number by article, less than 5 years references, Spanish author references, electronic references, “no scientific journal” references, and references of the different paediatric Spanish journals.
Results: We analysed 171 articles with 3316 total bibliographic references. The reference number mean by article was 19. The 5 year previous reference percentage was 52%, the Spanish reference was 29.7% , the electronic reference was 5% and the “no scientific journal” was 18,9%. From 3,316 total references, 9.2% was from paediatric Spanish journals: 2.3% from Boletin de Pediatría and 5% from Anales de Pediatría.
Conclusions: The bibliographic references from Boletín de Pediatría manage less than 30% of Spanish references and only 9% from Spanish paediatric journals. The references from our own Boletin de Pediatría are less than 3%.