The intense gravitational attraction of autophagy

In the course of my work as Autophagy editor, I try to gauge the overall patterns of interest in autophagy research. Not surprisingly, the number of papers associated with this topic has increased steadily. However, that trend provides only one glimpse into the way interest in this field has been changing—that the number of people working on autophagy has expanded. Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of different research areas that now include autophagy studies is also increasing. Thus, I decided to carry out an informal, imprecise analysis of the number of different journals (presumably reflecting in part the number of topics) that include papers on autophagy.