Report of China’s research growth and development in clinical microbiology

Abstract

Background: To investigate the academic status of clinical microbiology in China through survey of articles in international clinical microbiology journals and compare the outputs of clinical microbiology research of three major regions in China respectively—Mainland (ML), Taiwan (TW), and Hong Kong (HK). Methods: All articles of clinical microbiology were selected from “infectious disease”, “microbiology” and “virology” categories from Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in Web of Science. Articles from the ML, TW and HK were retrieved from PubMed. The number of total articles, clinical trials, case reports, impact factors (IF) and articles published in each journal were conducted for analyzing. Results: A total of 13,109 articles from 52 clinical microbiology journals were written by Chinese authors, 8,151 of which are from ML, 3,213 from TW, and 1,745 from HK. And the number of clinical trials and case reports in China is 1,272. Accumulated IF of articles from ML (31,061.1) was much higher than that of TW (11,934.48) and HK (7,301.624), while the average IF of articles from HK is the highest. Conclusions: The total number of articles from China especially ML increased significantly and steadily in the last decade whereas the amount of articles in HK and TW had been level off. The number of articles published from the ML is dominant through three regions in China, while the quality of articles is best in HK.