Philip Purnell

Theme 2: Scientific Impact

What can bibliometrics tell us about Biomedicine and Medicine?

Abstract

Through quantitative analysis of the publications and citations in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science citation index, we will show the global trends in Biomedicine and Medicine. Furthermore, we will break these data down by country in order to demonstrate the change in citation impact over the past 28 years and illuminate the proportion and trends of the publication and citation counts attributable to each territory. As the Web of Science is the source of the most consistent global data, we can compare each country’s citation performance with European or global averages to identify the origin of the best performing research papers.

We will then show how citation metrics are used to pinpoint the best performing collaborations for one specific research institution and identify the co-authors involved in those collaborations by name, institution, field and country. We will show the how to normalize the citation counts for the field in which different authors have published and even show normalized ratios of citations compared with averages for the specific journals in which each paper was published. This has obvious implications as a valid solution to the often misleading comparisons made between citation counts to papers from different subject categories.

Finally, we will present the results of an analysis of the papers that have cited the biomedicine and medicine papers. This will allow research evaluators to build up a picture of the reach of influence of these fields by ranking the authors, institutions, fields and countries that have cited the source papers and again comparing them to global averages normalized by subject field to enable a true comparison of influence across subject fields.