The historical evolution (1956-1987) of the Spanish scientific production in anesthesiology and reanimation has been evaluated through the articles published in the Revista Española de Anestesiología y Reanimación. The yearly overall output had an exponential increase, with a duplication rate for the number of articles and pages of every 15 and 16 years, respectively, while the number of coauthors duplicated every 7 years. As a consequence, the coauthors/article ratio duplicated every 14 years, while the rates of articles and pages per author was reduced to one half every 14 and 16 years, respectively. It has been found that the absolute and relative productivity rates were distributed in such a way that the number of authors with a given productivity was inversely proportional to the square of productivity. The mean number of references was kept fairly constant through time, being as a mean 23.2 references per article. The references of articles written in English (77%) and Spanish (12%) predominated over other languages (11%), with a tendency to an increase of English at the expense of all other languages with time.