Medical conflicts and their effect on Korean liver-related publications: A 2019–2024 analysis

Background: Concerns have arisen about a potential decline in Korean liver-related research output in 2024, possibly attributable to recent and severe medical conflicts.We investigated whether liver-related publication rates in Korea, particularly in the capital versus non-capital regions and in surgery versus hepatology, decreased in 2024 relative to global trends.Methods: We first identified high-frequency liver disease-related keywords from PubMed searches over the past 6 years.Using these keywords, we retrieved publications from 2019 to 2024 (global) and then filtered for those with at least one author affiliated with Korea.Korean-authored papers were further subdivided by capital-region (Seoul/Gyeonggi/Incheon) versus non-capital-region affiliations, and by surgical versus hepatology specialties.The annual percentage of each subgroup's publications relative to the global total (% per global) was calculated for 2019-2023 and compared to 2024 values.Results: Between 2019 and 2023, Korea's publications comprised on average 5.21% (standard deviation 0.28) of the global total, decreasing to 4.50% in 2024 (-13.49%,p=0.0051).The capital region's share declined from 4.09% to 3.60% (-12.13%,p=0.0129), while the non-capital region's share fell from 1.11% to 0.91% (-18.52%,p=0.0026).Surgery-affiliated papers decreased from 1.64% to 1.38% (-15.85%,p=0.028), and hepatology-affiliated papers from 2.31% to 2.04% (-11.65%,p=0.0089).Conclusion: Our findings indicate a significant drop in Korea's liver disease-related publications during 2024, relative to global trends, with the decrease more pronounced in non-capital regions and in surgery.These results suggest that recent medical conflicts may have adversely affected research output in this field.