Understanding distribution of published pediatric imaging research in radiology journals is relevant to understanding the state of research in the field.

To understand the current state of published original pediatric imaging research in major clinical radiology journals other than Pediatric Radiology.

We reviewed clinical imaging journals from among the top 20 radiology journals according to the Google Scholar h5-index as of June 2024. Content pages were reviewed for the years 2019-2023 to identify pediatric original research. Study titles were reviewed to subclassify by pediatric subspecialty. The number of citations for each pediatric article and for all articles in the journal was documented, and a citation to article ratio was calculated. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to assess differences in citation to article ratio.

Nine journals and 636 pediatric articles were included. The fraction of pediatric studies in each journal ranged from 0.9% (12/1,310) to 15.3% (244/1,594) (median 2.2% [88/3,983]). Pediatric neuroimaging studies were the most common (46.4% [295/636] of all pediatric studies, 23.2% [91/392] of pediatric studies in journals other than American Journal of Neuroradiology). The citation to article ratio for pediatric articles ranged from 3.3 to 25.2 across journals. Overall, the citation to article ratio for pediatric studies was not significantly different from non-pediatric studies (P=0.12).

Pediatric research makes up a small fraction of original research in major clinical radiology journals, with neuroimaging reflecting the bulk of published work. The average number of citations per pediatric article is similar to that of non-pediatric articles.