Current use of medical eponyms – a need for global uniformity in scientific publications

This study was carried out in two phases – first phase in 1998 and second phase in 2008. In the first phase, we manually searched the terms "Down syndrome" and "Down's syndrome" in the indexes of 70 medical books, and 46 medical journals. In second phase, we performed PubMed search with both the terms, followed by text-word search for the same.In the first phase, there was an overall tilt towards possessive form – 62(53.4%) "Down's syndrome" versus 54(46.6%) "Down syndrome." However, the American publications preferred the nonpossesive form when compared with their European counterpart (40/50 versus 14/66; P < 0.001). In the second phase, PubMed search showed, compared to "Down syndrome," term "Down's syndrome" yielded approximately 5% more articles. The text-word search of both forms between January 1970 and June 2008 showed a gradual shift from "Down's syndrome" to "Down syndrome," and over the last 20 years, the frequency of the former was approximately halved (33.7% versus 16.5%; P < 0.001). The abstracts having possessive form were mostly published from the European countries, while most American publications used nonpossesive form consistently.Inconsistency in the use of medical eponyms remains a major problem in literature search. Because of linguistic simplicity and technical advantages, the nonpossessive form should be used uniformly worldwide.Eponyms are in daily use in medicine. Eponym indicates the name of a person after whom something such as a discovery, invention, institution etc is named usually to commemorate the importance of his/her contribution. A recent debate entitled "Should eponyms be abandoned?" evoked strong responses both in favour and against the motion, and added interesting insights to the current use of medical eponyms [1,2]. The proponents call on the editors of medical journals and textbooks to abandon the use of eponyms because they "lack accuracy, lead to confusion, and hamper scientific discussion in a globalised world" [1]. On th