Fig. 1

Time distribution of SSc publications. Numbers of SSc (red solid line) and health and life sciences (blue solid line) publications are shown by year during 1969–2018, which was divided into three stages according to the speed of publication accumulation. Both linear and exponential adjustment of the data was carried out to check whether production follows Price’s Law of exponential growth. Exponential adjustment (red dashed line): \(y = 8.42E - 34e^{0.04105*x} { }\left( {r^{2} = 0.8855} \right)\). Linear adjustment (red dotted line): \(y = - 30551.40 + 15.51*x \left( {r^{2} = 0.7824} \right)\). SSc systemic sclerosis