Benchmarking biomedical publications worldwide

Abstract

Assessing scientific productivity This editorial refers to Worldwide research productivity in the field of rheumatology from 1996 to 2010: a bibliometric analysis, by Tao Cheng and Guoyou Zhang on pages 1630–4. The growth of science is a consistent feature over the long term. Outputs of scientific research fall into three main categories: new knowledge, new technologies or practical advances and highly qualified human resources [1]. Publication is often viewed as the definitive criterion of scientific productivity. The main indicators for productivity are based on the number of scientific publications, although publication is well known to be only a part of the research process [2]. The number of scientific publications and journals has grown steadily over time: between 1650 and 1950, the number of scientific journals doubled every 13 years on average [3]. Crude measures show that the volume of science as evaluated by the number of publications is increasing 10-fold every 50 years. According to a recent study, the worldwide annual growth rate for scientific publications, derived from the Science Citation Index (SCI), is 2.3% [3]. The total number of biomedical articles increased from about 100 000 in 1951 to about 800 000 in 2009, with 94.3% of articles being in English (vs 50% in 1951). This growth is driven in part by emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan. The biomedical articles published in China during the past decade (2000–09) outnumbered those published in the USA from 1980 to 1989. Asia contributed half the biomedical articles produced outside Europe and North America [4] (Table 1).

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