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Author(s) -
J. Picard
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
anaesthesia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.839
H-Index - 117
eISSN - 1365-2044
pISSN - 0003-2409
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2044.2002.02913_32.x
Subject(s) - medicine , anesthesia
Reports on the share of articles in some categories of biomedical journals are documented for the top-ranking countries [1–3]. It would be interesting to quantify different countries’ contribution to the research output in anaesthesia. We conducted this study to elicit different countries’ positions in the field of anaesthesia along with the time trend. Seven journals on anaesthesia with the highest impact factor (Pain, Anesthesiology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, Anaesthesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, International Journal of Obstetric Anaesthesia, and Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia) were selected from the category Anesthesiology set by the Institute for Scientific Information [4]. Journals not available in the Medline database for the entire 1991–2000 period were excluded (Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica and Clinical Journal of Pain). The Medline database was searched in the 3rd week of April 2002 to elicit the number of articles (journal articles) published during 1991–2000 in these seven journals. Only journal articles were included for analyses, i.e. correspondence, editorials and news were excluded. The proportion of contributions by each of the countries was ranked in descending order. Non-parametric tests for trend were conducted to elicit any significant change over time using STATA statistical software [5]. All tests of significance were two-tailed and values of p 1⁄4 0.05 were considered significant. In total, 17 612 articles were published during 1991–2000 in the seven anaesthetic journals. Affiliation data were available for 17 466 (99.2%) articles. Table 1 shows the 20 top-ranking countries in terms of volume and share of total articles for each country. The USA contributed 35.1% of the total (6188 articles) and ranked top among all the countries followed by the UK (19.5%), Canada (7.6%) and Japan (7.3%). In time trend analysis, the share of articles by USA (p 1⁄4 0.01) and UK (p 1⁄4 0.01) went down significantly in the last decade (Table 1). On the other hand, Japan (p 1⁄4 0.01), Germany (p 1⁄4 0.01), France (p 1⁄4 0.02), Switzerland (p 1⁄4 0.04), Austria (p 1⁄4 0.01), Spain (p 1⁄4 0.03), Ireland (p 1⁄4 0.01) and China (p 1⁄4 0.01) showed significantly positive trends. There is no doubt that the United States leads all other countries in productivity of medical research [1–3, 6]. However, its share for research articles in anaesthesia was much lower (35.1%)