SCImago Database Research Articles

Subject and discipline-specific publication trends in South African medical research, 1996–2011

Medical and health sciences institutions and organisations are faced with challenges in resource allocation for research and publishing. The aim of this study was to retrospectively analyse South African publication trends in medicine to provide guidance for future strategic planning in academic medicine. We used the Scimago database spanning the years 1996–2011 to analyse South African publication outputs in a number of categories in medicine, as defined in the Scopus database. The data reveal a number of significant growth areas but also reveal areas that should potentially be growing but remain static. In some areas, growth has aligned with the expectations of health and disease trends, but other areas, in which growth would have been expected, have remained static. Interesting features are also revealed when the data are compared with those of other developed and developing countries. For 1996–2011, South African medical publication output ranked 33 in the world based on the number of publications, but 28 based on the h-index. Interestingly, whilst South Africa produced less than 25% of the output of India, the h-index for South Africa is 153 compared with 145 for India. South Africa’s medical publication output has steadily increased over the 14-year period but the number of citations per document has declined. This analysis provides a useful strategic overview for medical institutions and government funding organisations to guide the allocation of research budgets and resources in a discipline- or category-specific manner to influence research outputs.

Radiologia Brasileira: good news for Brazilian researchers

The indexation of Radiologia Brasileira (RB) at internationally recognized databases is a priority for the members of Colegio Brasileiro de Radiologia e Diagnostico por Imagem board of directors. This has also been the objective of practically all the most important Brazilian and international medical journals. Radiologia Brasileira has benefited from two recent events, namely, its indexation at the Scimago database, and the adoption by Capes of such a database as a journal evaluation criterion. The recent changes implemented in the Capes’ system of postgraduate programmes assessment have brought to the Brazilian scene what is already a reality in the international scientific environment: the increasing role of Scopus/Scimago, a database created by Elsevier which is comparable to the most traditional and, until recently, the unique and widely used Thomson Reuter’s ISIWeb of Science database. The Scimago database has gained recognition for covering a greater number of scientific publications, including all those journals indexed at ISI-Web. It covers about more than twice the number of journals included in the ISI-Web coming from a three times greater number of countries. A range of studies comparing both databases have not clearly demonstrated which is the best, considering that each of these databases presents advantages and disadvantages. It is important to highlight that both databases belong to business enterprises, and that ISI-Web operates on a paid-access basis, and Scimago, on a free-access basis. The journals are basically classified on the basis of their impact factor (IF – Thomson Reuter impact factor, calculated by ISIWeb) or of the equivalent factor calculated by Scimago, the Cites per Doc (C/D). Both factors present similar calculation formulas: they are calculated from the number of citations, over a determined year, of articles published by the journal in the two previous years, i.e., the impact is directly proportional to the number of citations received by the journal. By means of the Webqualis system, Capes classifies the journals as follows: A1 – IF or C/D ≥ 4; A2 – IF or C/D between 2.8 and 4; B1 – IF or C/D between 1.6 and 2.8; B2 – IF or C/D between 0.8 and 2.6; B3 – IF or C/D between 0.2 and 0.8; B4

Country Rank, Journal Rank and H-Index in the Field of Medicine in the Republic of Macedonia (1996-2008) Using Data from <i>SCImago</i>

Aim. The aim of this study was to present the country rank, journal rank and H-index in the field of medicine in the Republic of Macedonia (1996-2008) using data from SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SCImago) . Material and Methods. SCImago database was used for analysis of country rank, journal rank and H-index in the Republic of Macedonia and other former Yugoslav countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro) for the period of 1996-2008, as they are presented in the Scopus database. Results. Of a total number of 222 countries for the period of 1996-2008, the Republic of Macedonia with H-index of 20 is placed on the 118th position of the country rank, the percentage of citable documents in the field of medicine is 88.92%, and the percentage of relative production of documents in the world is below 0.01. In 2008, Macedonian biomedical journal Prilozi is ranked on the 2484th place with 0.048 SJR of citable documents in the last three years. The biggest H-index of 10, for the period between 2007and 2008, in the Republic of Macedonia had nephrology subject category, followed by medicine (miscellaneous) with H-index of 7, haematology and endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism with H-index of 6, transplantation, oncology and pathology and forensic medicine with H-index of 5. Conclusion. There is only one Macedonian biomedical journal (Prilozi, Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Section of Biological and Medical Sciences) included in the Scopus database for the period between 1996 and 2008, probably by mistake in the list of journals from Serbia, instead from the Republic of Macedonia. The priority task of the Editorial Boards of other Macedonian medical journals is to include their journals in the Scopus database.