Relative publication output and international collaboration in anaesthesiology and pain medicine: a bibliometric analysis from 1996 to 2021

Editor—Anaesthesia as a field has become increasingly academic over time, as reflected by the growing number of publications. However, it is unknown how the increasing anaesthesia output compares to medicine overall and how an individual country's anaesthesia output compares to the rest of the world. We re-evaluated anaesthesia output using the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index,1 an index used in international economics for calculating the relative advantage or disadvantage of a certain country in a certain class of goods or services and which has been applied to bibliometrics.