Biomedical Publication Trends by Geographic Area

Abstract

Along with uninterrupted globalisation of industry sponsored trials, there is also a complimentary trend in globalisation of biomedical research publications. This study pictures that geographical drift in publications, and also the geographic variation in high impact journal and evidence-based medicine articles. The PubMed publication data base was analysed as of December 3, 2009. Results revealed that more and more biomedical publications are based on research conducted outside North America and Europe. Today, the rest-of-world contributes approximately the same number of articles as either North America or Europe; some 350,000 articles annually, or 1,000 articles per day. This rapid growth in the number of articles is especially concentrated in a few emerging countries, notably China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan. The number of articles published by researchers in China between 2000 and 2009 outnumbered those published in the US from 1980-1989. High impact journal articles represented 2.3% (n=18,429) of all articles published in 2009. Today, five out of ten high impact journal articles are produced in North America, three out of ten in Europe, one out of ten in the rest-of-world and one out of ten in unidentified locations. The rest-of-world currently contributes almost the same number of evidence-based medicine articles as North America, and slightly fewer than Europe. In conclusion, Asia is clearly the “new kid on the block”, today contributing with about half of the biomedical articles produced outside North America and Europe. China stands out as the fastest growing country among emerging regions and Russia the slowest, as the only country with negative growth. We have previously reported an ongoing drift of industry sponsored clinical trials from established to emerging regions. However, this drift does not exactly mirror the globalisation process of biomedical publication output. For instance, Russia is the leading emerging location for industry sponsored trials, but the only large country world-wide with a negative growth in producing biomedical publications. Conversely, Iran stands out as the number one climber in the ranking of biomedical publications, but has little involvement in industry sponsored clinical trials. China has become a leader in biomedical research, but has not as yet entered the mainstream of industry sponsored clinical trial activities.