Abstract
Purpose: To analyze community pharmacy based research in Arab countries.Methods: Comprehensive review of the literature indexed by Scopus was conducted. Data from Jan 01, 2003 till December 31, 2013 was searched for documents with specific words pertaining to “community pharmacy” in any one of the 13 Middle Eastern Arab countries. The quality of publication was assessed using h-index obtained from Scopus and Impact Factor (IF) obtained from Journal Citation Report (JCR)Results: A total of 93 documents were retrieved with an h-index of 9. Thirty eight documents (40.9 %) were published in journals not listed in JCR and therefore had no IF. The sum of the IF of the 93 documents was 64.9 with a mean of 1.3 ± 2.01. The total number of citations was 338 with a mean of 3.6 ± 6.4 citations per document. The highest community pharmacy-based research was from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) (32.3 %) followed by United Arab Emirates (UAE) (17.2 %), Jordan (16.1 %),Kuwait (11.8 %) and Qatar (10.8 %). International cooperation was highest with Malaysia (9.7 %) followed by Pakistan (7.5 %), United Kingdom (UK) (8.6 %), and Australia (6.5 %).Conclusion: The quantity and quality of community pharmacy-based research originating from Middle Eastern Arab countries was low. More effort is needed to bridge the gap in community pharmacy-based research and to promote better community pharmacy services in Middle Eastern Arab countries.Keywords: Community pharmacy, Middle East, Bibliometric review
Highlights
In the past few years, several publications have described the community pharmacy profession in the Arab world [1,2]
Such study will lead to better understanding of the current and future community pharmacy practice in the Middle East
The key words or "medical subject headings (MeSH)" entered in Scopus to accomplish the objective of this study were “Community Pharmacy”, “Community Pharmacist”, or “Community Pharmacies”, or “Community Pharmaceutical Services” or “Community Pharmaceutical Service” as “title, keywords, abstract”
Summary
In the past few years, several publications have described the community pharmacy profession in the Arab world [1,2]. The general public in the Arab world reported positive perception and attitude toward community pharmacy profession and demanded more roles for community pharmacists in the health system [27]. In the Middle East, several studies have been published about pharmacy profession and education. None was published to analyze the quantity and quality of research in the field of pharmacy in general, and community pharmacy in particular. This study was conducted to analyze the quantity and quality of community pharmacy based research during the last decade (2003 – 2012). Such study will lead to better understanding of the current and future community pharmacy practice in the Middle East. The momentum for research activity needs to be maintained through continuous analysis of pharmacy publication from researchers in the region to provide feedback to academic institutions and education planners
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