CMI editorial report 2013

Abstract

At the request of the ECCMID, we have evaluated the balance between various countries’ involvements with and contributions to CMI [1]. First of all, microbiology is one of the fields in which Europe has produced more articles and generated more citations in 10 years (80 000 articles between 1997 and 2008, with 1.5 million citations [2]) than the USA (50 000 articles between 1997 and 2008, with 1.2 million citations [2]). This is one of the rare fields in which this trend can be clearly observed. By means of ISI the Web of Knowledge, we gathered the 40 ‘highly cited’ scientists in microbiology. Once we had extended their number of citations to ‘all fields’ and removed all synonyms, we obtained Table S1, which presents each author’s number of citations and H index. This shows that, among the 40 most cited microbiologists, 19 are American, 15 are European, and two are from other continents. In Europe, the countries with the most publications are the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and The Netherlands, followed by Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark [2]; the four most cited authors are French, German, British, and Italian [2]. The majority of the articles published within the last few years have essentially focused on genomics; the most cited of all is an article by Stewart Cole on the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis [3]. If we observe scientific production as a whole, it appears that this is correlated with the gross domestic product (GDP) (Fig. 1). An interesting point is raised by the comparison between the increase in GDP and that in global publications (Fig. 2). It seems clear that the countries whose scientific production is developingmost rapidly are the same as those that have been growing in termsof economyover these last 10 years. Among the countries with a high GDP, those that are progressing the most are those that are most open to international students, such as Spain, Australia, or Canada—all countries of immigrants. It seems that welcoming southern students and investigators is a factor in the increase in scientific production. In fact, a similar trend is observed in microbiology, with a noteworthy increase in southern countries’ scientific production (Fig. 3). More directly related to CMI, the most prolific contributors are as follows: Spain, France, China, Italy, Taiwan, The Netherlands, the USA, Germany, and India; those that publish the most are France, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Greece, China, Germany, and India (Table 1). The national ratios of submission per capita and those of acceptance are shown in Fig. 4. The reasons why some countries have very little success were analysed, and are shown in Table 2. The major reason for rejection (for 27% of the manuscripts) is that the topic is too locally focused, and thus might not concern the international community; 23% of the submissions were rejected for scientific reasons (e.g. not enough arguments, analysis lacking thoroughness, or contradictory or implausible results). Nineteen per cent of the submissions were outside of the journal’s scope, 17% focusing on non-priority subjects, and one review was rejected, because CMI publishes only invited reviews. For the remaining 13%, the reasons could not be analysed, because the manuscripts’ files had been archived. The poor coverage of south-eastern Europe and its neighbouring countries was partially addressed, as a first measure, by scheduling a thematic issue devoted to research on infectious diseases in Iran, Egypt, and Turkey [4–7]. Besides this specific region, CMI continues to receive and publish articles from all over the world (Tables 3 and S2).When 2012 figures were compared with statistics for the previous year [8], the most noticeable change concerned Brazil, whose acceptance rate grew by seven points; this gave it a very reasonable acceptance rate, taking it out of the category of least published countries. Also, Korea, Mexico, Croatia and Madagascar have, respectively, published 12%, 20%, 22% and 100% of their submissions, as compared with none in the previous year. Several new countries have also submitted this year: Bangladesh, Central African Republic, Estonia, Indonesia, Malta, Nigeria, and Uruguay. When we compared the sources of our articles over these last 4 years with those of a broad spectrum of journals of infectious diseases (Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Journal of Infection), it emerged that we publish significantly more articles from any European countries (including Turkey, and excluding the UK, which publishes more in the Journal of Infection) and also more articles from Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia than the investigated journals (Table S3).