Summary

Licensing

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license:

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

You are free:

• to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 truetrue

Source of chart data

I got these numbers from PubMed searches. For papers mentioning ME/CFS, I used the following query: ("myalgic encephalomyelitis") OR ("chronic fatigue syndrome") For papers with ME/CFS in the title, I used this query: ("myalgic encephalomyelitis"[Title]) OR ("chronic fatigue syndrome"[Title])

For each query, I downloaded the CSV of results by year. Then I combined the two CSVs in a spreadsheet, adding the omitted years where zero papers were published. Then I exported the file with both datasets together as papers.csv.

Source Data File

This is the file papers.csv that the gnuplot needs as an input. Copy and paste it into a text editor, and save as papers.csv.

# Year,Mentions,Titles
1955,1,0
1956,3,2
1957,7,5
1958,5,4
1959,5,3
1960,2,2
1961,2,2
1962,0,0
1963,1,1
1964,1,0
1965,0,0
1966,0,0
1967,1,1
1968,0,0
1969,1,1
1970,4,4
1971,0,0
1972,1,1
1973,3,3
1974,0,0
1975,0,0
1976,0,0
1977,1,1
1978,4,3
1979,1,1
1980,5,5
1981,5,5
1982,1,1
1983,2,2
1984,6,4
1985,5,3
1986,4,3
1987,6,4
1988,50,41
1989,69,50
1990,88,44
1991,214,119
1992,178,125
1993,149,90
1994,202,133
1995,181,117
1996,204,133
1997,205,137
1998,194,133
1999,201,125
2000,201,116
2001,220,128
2002,240,133
2003,208,121
2004,219,118
2005,199,119
2006,235,125
2007,259,133
2008,237,130
2009,271,159
2010,339,191
2011,373,197
2012,292,148
2013,302,182
2014,267,152
2015,331,189
2016,293,186
2017,305,186
2018,306,189
2019,339,205
2020,327,170
2021,431,225
2022,376,182
2023,403,184

Gnuplot code

I created this chart with Gnuplot, using the following code. It gets the numbers from the data file papers.csv, placed in the same folder as the gnuplot script.

# Output file options
set terminal svg size 800,630 background 'white' name 'Rate_of_publication_of_MECFS_papers' fname 'Noto Sans,16'
set output "gnuplot graph.svg"

# Input data file options
set datafile separator ','
set datafile commentschars '#'

# Graph style options
set title "ME/CFS Papers by year" font ",18"
set xlabel "Year of publication"
# Use this label instead to add a note about a year with incomplete data.
#set xlabel "Year of publication\n(2022 data is YTD as of 2022-12-02)"
set ylabel "Number of papers"

# Chart key/legend
# Only display graph border on left and bottom.
set border 3
set key left top
set grid x y
set tics front nomirror

# Plot the data
# ($1-0.25) offsets the bars 0.25 bars to the left.
# The (1) and (0.5) at the end of the argument to "using" defines the width of the bar.
# The third line is used to draw an outline for the mentions data on top of both data sets.
plot "papers.csv" using 1:2:(1) title "Papers mentioning ME/CFS" with boxes linecolor rgb "#0062C4" fillstyle solid noborder, \
    "papers.csv" using ($1-0.25):3:(0.5) title "Titles containing ME/CFS" with boxes linecolor rgb "#62C400" fillstyle solid noborder, \
    "papers.csv" using 1:2:(1) notitle with boxes linecolor rgb "black", \