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EDITORIAL

Is the publishing landscape of bioprinting research

going to change?

Editor-in-Chief: Chee Kai CHUA

Executive Director and Professor, Singapore Centre for 3D Printing, School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering,
College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJB.2016.02.011.

Bioprinting as a new and emerging research field is to present bioprinting as an independent research field
now gaining momentum. Figure 1 was generated from for the future of biotechnologies.
Scopus by using bioprinting as the search keyword. It The International Journal of Bioprinting (IJB) was
shows the trend of the number of published docu- launched in July 2015. It is the first academic journal
ments (article or review) per year. There are 361 whose primary focus is on bioprinting. By July 2016,
documents in total and 103 are published in the most it will publish about 30 articles in total, which is
nd
recent year. It is obvious that the bioprinting research equivalent to the 2 rank in Table 1. Moreover, since
field is rapidly growing. In fact, the number of docu- the beginning of this year, at least three new journals
ments per year is tripled from 2012 to 2015. Most of have joined the bioprinting family: 3D Printing in
the published documents went to the journals listed in Medicine (by Springer), Bioprinting (by Elsevier) and
Table 1, and the top one has published 53 documents. Journal of 3D Printing in Medicine (by Future Medi-
Although our search keyword is limited to bioprinting cine). With so many journals dedicated to bioprinting
only, Figure 1 and Table 1 already give us a glimpse research, it is expected that the publishing landscape
of the publishing landscape of bioprinting research of bioprinting research is going to experience accele-
before 2015. rated growth over the next few years.
It is worthy to note that bioprinting research now We also checked the landscape by subject area, and
shows prominent presence in most of the biotechnol- the growth pattern has been stable over the past five ye-
ogy, biomaterials and tissue engineering journals. ars. Current perception and definition of bioprinting is
These trends further validate the vision of this journal mainly from five areas: engineering, biology, material

Table 1. Top 20 journals in terms of number of documents from 2004 to 2015 (data source: Scopus)
Journal Documents Journal Documents
Biofabrication 53 Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A 6
Biomaterials 16 Nanomedicine 5
Advanced Healthcare Materials 15 Artificial Organs 5
Lab on A Chip 10 Advanced Materials 5
Acta Biomaterialia 9 Trends in Biotechnology 5
Biotechnology Journal 8 Plos One 5
Tissue Engineering Part C Methods 8 Virtual and Physical Prototyping 4
Biotechnology and Bioengineering 7 Macromolecular Bioscience 4
Tissue Engineering Part A 7 Biomedical Microdevices 4
Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative 6 IEEE Pulse 4
Medicine

Is the publishing landscape of bioprinting research going to change? © 2016 Chee Kai CHUA. This is an Open Access article distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting
all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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