Abstract
BackgroundEye diseases with increasing mortality are common health problems that affect people of all ages and demographic backgrounds. In this study, we study the publication characteristics in international ophthalmic journals of the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, and China.MethodsArticles published in 53 ophthalmic journals from 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from the PubMed database. We recorded the number of articles published each year, analyzed the publication type, and evaluated the accumulated and average impact factors (IFs), and the distribution of articles in ophthalmic journals in relation to IFs. The characteristics of publication outputs from China and other top-ranking countries were compared.ResultsThe total number of articles increased significantly during the past 12 years, with an increase of 51.0%. The growth in the annual number of articles from the US, the UK, Australia, and China showed a significantly positive trend. Publications from the US exceeded those from any other country and had the highest IFs, largest number of total citations of articles, and the most articles published in leading ophthalmic journals. During the past 12 years, China contributed 3.5% of the total publications, and the number of Chinese articles showed a more than 6-fold increase (from 99 to 605, R2 =0.947, P<0.001). The numbers of IFs and citations of articles originating in China were mostly lower than for other top-ranking counties.ConclusionsResearch on ophthalmic journals has maintained an upward growing trend from 2000 to 2011. Chinese ophthalmology research has developed rapidly, but the gap still exists between China and other top-ranking countries for the advanced level of research.
Highlights
Eye diseases with increasing mortality are common health problems that affect people of all ages and demographic backgrounds
Many bibliometric researches had been devoted to the field of medicine, such as oncology [2], anesthesiology [3], gastroenterology [4], and ophthalmology [5] et al Eye diseases are common health problems that affect people of all ages and demographic backgrounds
The selection criteria as previous studies described [2,7,8] was that the journal (i) was listed in the “ophthalmology” category of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) subject categories by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI); (ii) was indexed in the PubMed database; and (iii) had impact factors (IFs) according to Thomson Reuters in ISI’s 2011 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) [9]
Summary
Eye diseases with increasing mortality are common health problems that affect people of all ages and demographic backgrounds. We study the publication characteristics in international ophthalmic journals of the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, and China. Many bibliometric researches had been devoted to the field of medicine, such as oncology [2], anesthesiology [3], gastroenterology [4], and ophthalmology [5] et al. Eye diseases are common health problems that affect people of all ages and demographic backgrounds. The present study was designed to study the publication characteristics in international ophthalmic journals of China and other top-ranking countries over the past 12 years (2000.1.1-2011.12.31)
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