2.1

Authors identification

For this study, we identified relevant authors as those who had published at least one article between 2019 and 2023 in a journal indexed by Scopus within the “Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine” subject area, as per the 2022 Scopus CiteScore rankings.

The full list of included journals (100 journals) is available as supplementary material for consultation (see Additional File 1).

We then searched for full articles published in these journals between 2019 and 2023, retrieving all the authors with valid Scopus IDs from each article.

To determine the productivity of each retrieved author, we searched the Scopus database for all full articles for each identified author, including even those outside the “Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine” subject area.

To identify relevant articles we first performed a search with the following string: “PUBYEAR > 2018 AND PUBYEAR < 2024 AND (DOCTYPE (ar) OR DOCTYPE (ip) OR DOCTYPE (re)) AND JOURNAL_ID” , where we substituted the “JOURNAL_ID” with the ID taken from the list of critical care journals published by scopus. We then extracted all the AUTHOR_IDs of all the authors of all the articles returned by the previous search and searched for all publications for each author in the same timespan, using the following string: “PUBYEAR > 2018 AND PUBYEAR < 2024 AND (DOCTYPE (ar) OR DOCTYPE (ip) OR DOCTYPE (re)) AND AUTHOR_ID”. The search was performed on 28th of Febrary.

Full papers included the Scopus categories “article” and “review” All other items, such as “editorial”, “note”, “letter”, “correction”, “conference papers” and others, were excluded from the count.

For each retrieved publication we extracted: the list of authors expressed as ScopusID, the paper title, the keywords, the publication year, the number of co-authors, the number of citations.

Gender of the identified authors was determined by searching for the profile picture retrieved in institutional sites, news outlets or on the personal page of social networks such as ResearchGate.

2.2

Definitions

Based on previously published studies in the field [ , ], we defined HA as those who published at least 73 original research articles (approximately one paper every five days), while AHA were identified as those who published more than 60 articles in a single year (one research article every six days). The sum of HA and AHA authors are called “extremely productive” (EP) authors.

2.3

COVID related literature

To identify the effect of COVID related literature we created a subset of the database removing all the articles containing at least one of the following strings: “COVID”, “Sars-cov-2”, “Sars-cov2”, “corona” or “pandemi∗” in the title or among the listed keywords; the retrieved publications were then manually checked to ensure their relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2.4

Statistic

Normality of continuous data was investigated with the Shapiro Wilk test. Normal distributed variables were reported as mean and standard deviation, while non normal data was reported as median and interquartile range, or minimum maximum as appropriate, categorical variables were reported as numbers and percentages.

Data extraction from the Scopus database was performed using a custom Python script (Python 3.11, Python Software Foundation) and the library Pybliometrics [ ], this library is a Python based tool to pull, cache and extract data from the Scopus database.