Five-year bibliometric analysis of the Journal of the Foot & Ankle (2020-2025)

Abstract

Objective: To characterize productivity, document-type composition, authorship, geography, and citation impact of the Journal of the Foot & Ankle (JFA) over its first five years (2020-2025) following its 2020 refoundation. Methods: All peer-reviewed articles published in JFA between January 2020 and December 2025 were retrieved from OpenAlex and cross-checked against Crossref. The 22 articles of the founding issue (V14 N1) were registered under the predecessor journal’s ISSN and recovered separately. Meeting abstracts, articles outside the study period, editorials, and one tribute were excluded. Document type was classified by manual review of each issue’s Table of Contents. Author productivity was measured by leadership appearances (first or last author), country and institution by whole counting at the article level, and citation impact by cumulative counts and the journal h-index. Analysis was performed in R. Results: A total of 334 articles were included, with a mean of 56 per year. Original articles accounted for 68.9%. Unique authors totaled 1,037, with a mean of 5.2 per article. Brazil was the predominant country in 185 articles (55.4%), followed by the United States (10.2%) and Argentina (6.0%). The most productive institution was the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (23 articles). The total accumulated 272 citations with a journal h-index of 6. César de César Netto led the leadership ranking with 15 appearances (14 as senior author). International collaboration had a mean of 10.5%. Conclusion: JFA has consolidated as the principal Ibero-American outlet for foot and ankle research, with a Brazilian-anchored yet regionally inclusive authorship, sustained Diamond Open Access, and an early but rising citation footprint. Level of Evidence IV; Bibliometric, Descriptive Observational Study.