Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Burns care requires extensive multi-disciplinary expertise spanning surgical, medical and allied health specialties. While collaboration is fundamental to clinical practice, systematic analysis of multi-specialty academic partnerships in burns research has been limited. Understanding the specific patterns of interdisciplinary involvement provides crucial insights into how collaborative clinical care models translate into academic medicine. METHODS: We analyzed 18 275 articles from 11 burns journals(1982-2025) using automated PubMed data mining to identify collaborative publications. Specialty involvement was determined through systematic affiliation analysis across all papers. Multi-specialty combinations were categorized to assess percentage involvement of multiple specialties. Statistical analysis included chi-square tests for specialty involvement patterns and linear regression for temporal trends. RESULTS: Among 14 675 analyzable papers, multi-specialty involvement affected 15.6% of all burns literature, demonstrating substantial interdisciplinary collaboration across the field. Plastic surgery appeared in 28.6% of all papers, general surgery in 19.4%, with combined plastic-general surgery collaboration comprising 5.5% of the entire corpus (805 papers). Plastic surgery-general surgery papers were significantly more likely to involve additional specialties than single-department publications (OR = 1.64, χ(2) = 33.543, p<.001). The most common multi-specialty combination was plastic + general surgery (4.05% of all papers). Individual specialty involvement revealed: pediatrics (9.3% of all papers), critical care (5.2%), physical therapy (4.5%), anesthesia (3.7%). Temporal analysis demonstrated dramatic growth in multi-specialty collaboration: from 0.9% of papers (1980s) to 27.8% (2020s), representing a 30-fold increase in interdisciplinary partnerships over four decades. CONCLUSIONS: This analysis reveals that collaboration in burns surgery extends far beyond clinical practice into academic medicine, with systematic patterns of multi-specialty involvement reflecting the complexity of burn care. The dramatic 30-fold increase in multi-specialty publications demonstrates the field's evolution toward integrated care models. Nearly a fifth of all burns literature now involves multiple specialties, with plastic surgery-general surgery partnerships serving as collaboration catalysts that significantly increase likelihood of additional specialty involvement. These findings establish burns surgery as a model for multi-specialty academic collaboration in reflecting real-life clinical practice. APPLICABILITY OF RESEARCH TO PRACTICE: This research highlights the importance of multi-specialty collaboration in burn care. There is a push for collaboration in medicine among specialties. Allowing for strong relationships between specialties will ultimately lead to better patient care. FUNDING FOR THE STUDY: N/A.