Chest
Volume 128, Issue 6, December 2005, Pages 3993-3998
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Special Reports
A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research Production in Respiratory Medicine

https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.128.6.3993Get rights and content

Study objectives:

To evaluate the contribution of different world regions in respiratory research productivity.

Methods:

The world was divided into nine regions based on a combination of geographic, economic, and scientific criteria. Using the PubMed database, we retrieved information about the origin of articles from 30 journals included in the Respiratory System category of the Journal Citation Reports database for a 9-year period (1995 to 2003). We estimated the total number of publications, their mean impact factor, the product of these two parameters, and the research productivity per million of population of the world area divided by the gross national income per capita (GNIPC), for every year and the whole period of the study, for all defined world regions.

Measurements and results:

Data on the country of origin of the publications was available for 48,614 of 49,382 retrieved articles (98.5%). The majority of articles published between 1995 and 2003 originated from Western Europe (40.4%) and the United States (35.4%). The research productivity compared to population and the GNIPC was found to be higher for Canada and Oceania compared to the United States and Western Europe. The rate of increase of the total published research product (number of published articles multiplied by the impact factor) was higher in the United States and Europe. The total research contribution of Asia, Eastern Europe, Central and Latin America, and Africa regarding the number of published articles was notably very low (approximately 8%).

Conclusions:

The data suggest that there was a significant research activity in the field of respiratory medicine during the studied period. Although leaders of production of respiratory medicine research were from Western Europe and the United States, Canada, and Oceania had the best performance after adjustment for population and GNIPC.

Section snippets

World Division

The methodology that we used has been reported previously.12 For the purpose of our study, the world was divided into nine regions based on a combination of geographic, economic and scientific criteria. The nine regions are Western Europe, the United States, Japan, Canada, Asia, Eastern Europe, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa. All former socialist countries of Europe and Turkey were included in the category of Eastern Europe. Greenland was designated as Western Europe.

Results

A total of 49,382 articles indexed in PubMed that were in the Respiratory System category of the JCR for the period from 1995 to 2003 were included in our study. We were able to retrieve data for the origin of 48,614 articles (98.5%) and categorized them according to the country of origin based on the methodology described earlier.

In Table 1, we present the total production of articles by world region and the relative contribution of each region to the total number of articles from all 30

Discussion

To our knowledge, this is the first study that evaluated the relative contribution of all world regions in research productivity in the field of respiratory diseases during the period between 1995 and 2003. Although Western Europe published more articles than the United States, it ranked after the United States with regard to the total product of research productivity (number of articles multiplied by their impact factor). Japan, Canada, and Asia had modest research productivity in absolute

References (22)

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