Dr Capella's comments about our article. By chance alone, the greater the number of publications a given author has, the higher the likelihood that he or she will publish a frequently cited paper. Original articles by authors with many publications had a higher average number of citations per article than did those by authors with only a few publications. We do, however, strongly agree that no measure of scholarly productivity is without bias. We would argue that counting total citations in the literature is a better measure of scholarly productivity than the one proposed by Capella.
Textbooks represent the opinion of only a few authors and often emphasize older articles.
The peer-reviewed literature is far more current than textbooks and represents a far wider range of opinion as to which papers are worthy of note. However, most of the 24 journals we reviewed include many articles that are prepared by authors with little or no funding. There were over 60,000 authors of dermatology publications in the 24 journals we reviewed. This is strong evidence of the diversity of authorship in our specialty. MA 02215 Kenneth A. Arndt, MD Boston 1.