Fig. 2

Trends in the number of published papers; Japanese local and global status. The Ichushi Web is the most popular online database that collects literature information on medical fields in Japan; this service is operated by the Japan Medical Abstract Society (http://search.jamas.or.jp/) and primarily covers articles written in Japanese. The Ichushi Web covers original papers and conference proceedings published in academic journals in Japan covering the fields of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and veterinary medicine. As of September 2020, this service permits the searching and browsing of more than 14.3 million literature items. The figure shows the number of publications (excluding conference proceedings), categorized by year, that were returned by searches of the Ichushi and Pubmed databases. The number of the Japanese language papers discussing heat stroke has been increasing steadily (A). In contrast, the number of medical journal publications regarding climate change (with or without reference to kidney disease) remains low (while slowly increasing) in Japan compared to international trends for this topic (B–D)