Coverage of Journals from Mainland China in the Field of Emergency Medicine by Major International Biomedicine Databases

Abstract

Objective We aimed to explore the visibility of emergency medicine (EM) journals in mainland China based on the coverage by major indexing and abstracting information agencies and services. Methodology We first searched each journal by entering its title in Google's search engine, and then entered its home page to collect associated information, like publication cycle, journal language, publisher, editorial board, authors, and journal website. Second, to collect the inclusion information, totally ten databases were selected on the basis that they were considered as representative sources within the biomedicine. We adopted two forms for searching every journal: searching for every Chinese EM journal title (both English title and Chinese ‘ping yin’ title), and searching for the word ‘China’ from the fields provided for publisher of sources or for country of publication of sources indexed. Results Currently, in Mainland China, there were 13 EM journals, 12 in Chinese and one in English. Among them, both Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and BIOSIS Previews (BP) did not include any EM journals; both MEDLINE and Abstract Journals (AJ) included only one, respectively; Scopus, EMBASE, Index Copernicus (IC), and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) indexed two journals, respectively; Western Pacific Region Index Medicus (WPRIM) included four journals, and Chemical Abstracts (CA) included six journals. Conclusion Only a few Chinese EM journals are indexed or abstracted in the international databases. More work should be done to achieve higher visibility of EM journals. (Hong Kong j.emerg.med. 2015;22:41-45)