Figure 1. Publications on Tourette syndrome. The number of new publications on Tourette syndrome or other tic disorders each year was estimated from PubMed. The colored line is a LOWESS (locally weighted scatterplot smoothing) curve from the primary data.
PubMed was searched on 16 Feb 2015 using the search string “("Tic Disorders"[MeSH] OR Tourette NOT Tourette[AU]) AND 1800[PDAT] : yyyy[PDAT]” for each year yyyy from 1950 through 2014. Publications per year were computed as the difference of each year’s cumulative publications from the last. (This strategy addresses PubMed’s double-counting of electronic and paper publication dates for about 250 publications since 2005.) The graph was generated by matplotlib in python (see supplementary material).
import numpy as np
import csv
with open('publications_20150213_sheet2.csv', 'rb') as datafile:
data2 = np.recfromcsv(datafile, names=True)
years = data2['year'][0:65]
cumul = data2['cumulative_from_pubmed_directly'][0:65]
pubs2 = cumul[1:]-cumul[0:-1]
pubs3 = np.insert(pubs2, 0, 0)
import statsmodels.api as sm
lowess = sm.nonparametric.lowess
b = lowess(pubs3,years,frac=1./3)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
plt.scatter(years[1:],pubs3[1:],color='black')
plt.plot(b[1:,0],b[1:,1],'red',linewidth=3)
plt.axis((1950,2015,0,250))
plt.xlabel('Year',fontsize=16)
plt.ylabel('Publications (PubMed)',fontsize=16)
plt.legend(['smoothed','new publications'], loc='upper left')
plt.savefig('TS_publications.png', dpi=600, transparent=True)
plt.show()
print "year\tpubs" ; print "====\t===="
for index in range(0,years.size):
print "{0:>}\t{1:>4}".format(years[index],pubs3[index])