AB1151 Turkey's Contribution to Rheumatology Research: An Analysis of the Years 2007-2011

BackgroundBibliometric analysis helps to determine the quantity and the quality of the research in a specialty or country. For rheumatology field Cheng et al. provided information about worldwide research productivity from 1996 to 2010. Even though, their overall research yields important data about research productivity in the field of rheumatology, as to our knowledge, there is no report was performed about Turkey's contribution to rheumatology research until now.ObjectivesTo investigate scientific papers published by Turkish Rheumatologists between 2007 and 2011 in the top 5 rheumatology journals according to 5-year impact factor.MethodsTop 5 journals of rheumatology field, according to 5-year impact factor was determined from Web of Science as follows: Nature Reviews of Rheumatology, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Arthritis & Rheumatology, Arthritis Care & Research and Arthritis Research and Therapy. These journals screened via their websites and all the scientific papers belong to 2007-2011 were included in the study. Papers such as Editor's notes or Announcements were not included. Supplementary issues were not investigated neither. All papers were investigated one-by-one for detecting if they have a Turkish named author or Turkish institute. Articles published by a Turkish author or institute from Turkey were analyzed further. Citation counts of articles from Turkish authors were determined via Google Scholar and Web of Science databases.ResultsA total of 7,907 papers (Nature Reviews of Rheumatology: 672, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases: 1977, Arthritis & Rheumatology: 2648, Arthritis Care & Research: 1313 and Arthritis Research and Therapy: 1297) were investigated. Totally 175 papers (2.21%) were found as at least one Turkish listed as an author. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (67 papers) was the top journal where Turkish authors published most. Among this 175 papers, authors informed that they contributed to the study from Turkey in 70 papers (40%). Other 60% were papers from Turkish origin authors who lives and researches outside of Turkey. USA (45 papers), Switzerland (24 papers) and the Netherlands (18 papers) were the top 3 countries where Turkish origin authors listed as their institution were in that country. These 175 articles were cited totally 18.085 times according to Google Scholar and 10.378 times according to Web of Science.ConclusionsThe total contribution and cite counts of Turkey are in accordance with the literature. Accordi