PubMed Citation Totals by Publication Year from 1781

MEDLINE/PubMed Baseline data provides yearly citation totals for biomedical literature. The dataset includes columns for specific years from 2004 to 2022, such as 2012, 2021, and 2008, tracking the cumulative addition of citations over time. It is hosted by datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov and was last updated on 2025-06-18.

Use Cases

• Analyzing publication growth trends over time using the Citation Year and yearly columns like 2010, 2015, and 2020.
• Modeling the rate of retrospective citation addition for historical years (e.g., 2004, 2006) using data from later baseline snapshots.
• Comparing citation volume across specific publication years (e.g., 2018 vs. 2019) for longitudinal studies.
• Forecasting future annual publication counts by training on the time-series pattern of columns from 2004 to 2022.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal range from 1781, as indicated by the description.
• Includes specific yearly data columns from 2004 through 2022 for detailed annual analysis.
• Data is updated with new baseline snapshots, as shown by the example of citations for 1800 increasing between 2018 and 2019.

Limitations

• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov

Collection Method

Aggregated from the MEDLINE/PubMed Baseline, which references citations back to 1781.

Time Range

1781 to at least 2022

Freshness

Last updated 2025-06-18 21:07:23; freshness should be verified.