International activity in cardiovascular research : trends in the output and impact of research papers from the UK, USA, Japan, Germany and France.

Date:
[1994?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: International activity in cardiovascular research : trends in the output and impact of research papers from the UK, USA, Japan, Germany and France. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Fig 3 3 International comparison of cardiovascular publications activity indices: 1988-1991 (Medline analysis) Activity index 1.40 Japan 0.80 1988 1989 1990 1991 Cardiovascular Number of national cardiovascular papers / Number of national biomedical papers Research = : Activity Index Numbet of world cardiovascular papers / Number of world biomedical papers Figure 3 shows the emphasis placed 1.00 suggests lower than expected on cardiovascular research by different activity. From 1988 to 1991 Japan countries in relation to their overall and Germany consistently had activity national activity in biomedical indices above 1.00, suggesting that in research. these countries cardiovascular science To show this clearly, it is necessary had some prominence within their to compute a 'cardiovascular research national research portfolios, activity index' for each country for In contrast, in the UK, US and each year, using the formula above. France cardiovascular research had An index greater than 1.00 reveals a less prominence, with low, and greater than expected output of declining activity indices. By 1991, cardiovascular research in relation to indices for the UK and US had fallen the world norm, whilst a value below below 1.00. Thus, while the UK and Fig 4 Citation impact of cardiovascular papers: 1981-1986 (SCI analysis) Relative Citation Index 1.40 1.20 • -^~r.''. 1.00 ~ ~— 0.80 0.60 rrrzEE 0.40 0.20 0.00 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 US publish large numbers of cardio- vascular papers each year, it is clear that this field does not stand out in these countries, as it does in Japan and Germany. Whilst the number of papers produced by a country gives some measure of the productivity of its cardiovascular research enterprise, the number of citations received by these papers gives some measure of the country's impact or influence in this field internationally. Figure 4 shows the results of such an analysis. UK US Germany France Japan Citations per paper for country A Relative Citation Index = (RCI) Citations per paper for all countries Here the average number of citations per cardiovascular paper for a country is compared to the world average cita- tions per cardiovascular publication, using a Relative Citation Index. Given that citation analysis could only be conducted using the SCI, the analysis is limited to the period 1981-1986. Values above 1.00 denote a citation impact highet than the world norm. By this measure, US and UK cardiovascular research papers had above average impact internationally. In contrast, although Japan and Germany appeared in recent years to be relatively active in cardiovascular research (Fig 3), the evidence of figure 4 is that these countries were having below average citation impact in this field, at least during the first half of the 1980s.