Growth of usage of the word “robust” in recent publications. (A) The number of biomedical publications each year containing the word “robust” in the title or abstract, indexed by the National Library of Medicine and accessed via PubMed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed on October 20, 2003. Publications that included the word “robust” only in the author field (eg, publications by Drs Robusto, Robustellini, Robustelli, and Robustova) were excluded. Although PubMed searches also retrieve a small subset of paleontology and anthropology articles, reading the recent abstracts verified that the growth of articles containing the word “robust” has not come because research concerning Australopithecus robustus and related East African hominids is proceeding at an astonishing pace. The total annual number of PubMed-indexed publications increased less than 2-fold from 1982 to 2002. Figures for 2003 are projected based on occurrences of robust through October 1. (B) The number of articles published in Blood each year that have included the word “robust” in the abstract, title, or text of the article. The full text of all Blood articles published since January 1990 was searched at http://www.bloodjournal.org/search.dtl on October 20, 2003.