Background/Purpose: Recent estimates predict that up to 12 million adults in the United States suffer from Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS). That is compared to around 1.3 million adults with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), around 300 thousand adults with scleroderma, and around 250 thousand adults with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Despite the greater prevalence of FMS is the US adult population, we hypothesize that FMS is under-researched and under-represented in the rheumatology scientific literature.

Methods: The number of articles published by 5 major rheumatology journals (Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, Arthritis & Rheumatology, Arthritis Care & Research, Journal of Clinical Rheumatology, and Journal of Rheumatology) were reviewed from 2014 – 2024. We used representative keywords to search each journal for the following rheumatologic disease diagnoses: Fibromyalgia, Osteoarthritis, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Gout, Sjogren’s Syndrome, Scleroderma, Ankylosing Spondylitis, and Psoriatic arthritis. The frequency of each diagnosis was calculated in each Journal in addition to all the articles combined. Chi-Square test was used to compare the proportion of FMS articles with each other rheumatologic disease. A p-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results: 7696 articles were identified and included. Fibromyalgia had the least proportion of articles compared to other rheumatic disease in both Annals of Rheumatic Diseases and Arthritis & Rheumatology. Overall, RA comprised most papers (35.8%), while Scleroderma and FMS were the least frequent (2.0% and 2.1% respectively) (Figure 1, 2). The overall proportion of FMS related articles was significantly lower than the proportions of articles related to other rheumatologic diseases (p< 0.05) except for Scleroderma, where there was no statistically significant difference (p >0.05).

Conclusion: Despite the high prevalence of FMS, related papers in were significantly published less often than any other rheumatologic diagnosis except for Scleroderma. This demonstrates the need for further research in the field of FMS. Our findings could also indicate potential publication bias, where studies reporting positive or significant data are more likely to be published, and negative or non-significant results in FMS are under-published. Further studies are needed to better understand this under-representation, and future efforts are encouraged to address gaps in FMS literature.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/fibromyalgias-under-representation-in-rheumatology-literature-a-ten-year-analysis-of-disease-specific-article-distribution/