Background: Less than 1.2% of papers published in the first 50 volumes of the journal Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle--the major official journal of Hungarian neurologists--focused on headache despite the fact that headache is among the most frequent complaints in neurological consultations. In the current study the authors evaluated the presence of headache as the main topic in articles of the Hungarian medical literature.
Methods: They identified full publications on headache by handsearching all volumes of the journal Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle from 1950 till the end of 2003. Electronic searches were performed to find Hungarian papers focusing on headache using the bibliographic databases of the Hungarian National Library of Healthcare (Hungarian Medical Bibliography, HMB) and the American National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (Medline and Oldmedline). Results of handsearch and electronic searches were cross checked for the journal Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle.
Results: Of the 2618 full papers published in Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle headache was the main topic in 32 articles (1.2%), most of them published after 1985. The electronic search of the HMB resulted in 132 documents in 41 journals, whereas using the PubMed search engine, they identified 66 Hungarian papers on headache. Migraine was the most frequent topic of interest in papers found by all three searches. The HMB search identified all headache articles published after 1990 in Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle which were identified by handsearch. The Oldmedline, database contained four of the seven papers identified by handsearch from 1954-1964. After 2002, the start of indexing Clinical Neuroscience/Ideggyógyászati Szemle in the Medline, the only article identified by handsearch was also found by the electronic search.
Conclusion: After the lack of interest until the mid-1980-ies, headache became a frequent topic in the Hungarian medical literature. Bibliographical data of articles on headache published after 1990 can be identified by electronic searches of the Hungarian and international bibliographic databases using carefully constructed but simple search strategies. An increasing presence of Hungarian headache research was found in international journals in the last two decades.