EducationA Bibliometric Evaluation of Publications in Urological Journals among European Union Countries between 2000–2005
Introduction
Bibliometry is a valuable tool to measure scientific activities at individual, department, university, and national level mainly by assessing statistics of publications provided by medical databases. Relevant parameters include number of publications during a time period, the impact of those publications related to the impact factor of the respective journal (IF), and the citation frequency of published articles [1], [2]. These criteria could be considered as indicators of the quantity and quality of research productivity although limitations of the criteria like the IF or the citation analysis should always be taken into account [1], [3], [4], [5]. National and international comparison of one discipline and between disciplines delineates strengths and weaknesses thus giving objectives and implications to governments. Against the background of limited research resources benchmarking in research is progressively gaining importance. While bibliometric analyses for several biomedical disciplines in Europe have been published data on comparative publication activity in urology among European countries are to date not available [2], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11].
In view of this situation, we decided to perform a bibliometric analysis of international urological journals between 2000–2005. For the purpose of availability and completeness of data only the original 15 member countries of the European Union (EU15) (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) were included in this study since the other countries joined the EU in the period of evaluation. The aims were to (1) examine the quantity and quality of publications of the EU15 countries using the criteria total publication number and IF, (2) analyse these bibliometric parameters in relation to population size and the socio-economic indicators gross domestic product (GDP), gross domestic expenditure on research and experimental development (GERD), and expenditure on health care (HCE), and (3) compare the results between the EU15 countries, USA, and the world.
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Data collection and search strategy
Nineteen urological journals were included in our study as they met the following criteria: 1) indexed in Thomson Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) under the subject category “Urology&Nephrology” with impact factors during 2000–2005, 2) included in the databases PubMed and Web of Science, respectively, 3) English language (Table 1). The Web of Science database has the advantage of listing the institutional addresses of all authors while PubMed only refers to the first author’s
Publication activity related to the numbers of publications by journal and country
The contributions from each country in each journal were counted. Detailed information is given in Table 3 and Fig. 1. Table 4 summarizes the total number of publications for each country and shows the per cent values related to the EU15 community and World. A total of 19.709 original articles were counted. 34.9% (EU15-net:6.878) came from the EU15 and 40.2% (7.927) from USA. United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy were the leading countries with 51.7% of all EU15 publications and 20.8% of world’s
Discussion
This is to our knowledge the first published study evaluating the publication output in urology among European countries, USA, and the world. As outlined in the Introduction results of bibliometric analyses should always be critically interpreted due to their general and specific limitations to characterize research output. In order to assess the results of our study correctly various limitations should be considered and briefly discussed.
First, only urological journals of the JCR subject
Conclusions
This survey demonstrated that a bibliometric analysis of publications in international urological journals can serve as a useful rational approach to benchmark the research activities among European nations. Geographical distribution of scientific performance must not only be analysed in absolute terms but also in relation to complementary variables such as population, GDP, GERD, HCE in order to provide a more realistic view. The study accredited the great significance of European research in
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Both authors contributed equally to this manuscript.