A Bibliometric Picture of Hand Surgery Subspecialty In Turkey: Where Are We Heading?

Abstract

Objectives: In order to provide up-to-date and effective results for patients any medical field should bring up its academic productivity since it is a powerful indicator for the advancement of that specific research field. There are no specific studies that evaluate the current academic productivity of hand surgery at Turkey. With this study we aimed to compare and contrast the quality and the quantity of the hand surgery publications derived from Turkey for two five-year periods. Method: Between 2008-2017, publications containing original articles and reviews published with country of origin as Turkey (CU=TURKEY) in Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals were included in the study. Papers were sorted from WoS categories of surgery, orthopedics and emergency medicine. Then works containing ''Hand” as a keyword grouped into two according to the publication year, 2008-2012 and 2013-2017. The bibliometric data such as the journal in which the publication is published, index of the journal and the number of citations were compared. Results: A total of 16848 publications that meet the criteria published between the specified dates have been evaluated. 421 of these publications contain the keyword "Hand". 187 of these publications were published in between 2008 and 2012 and 234 were printed after 2012. A chi-square test showed that there was no significant association between these two periods, X2 (1, N=16848) = .206, p=.65. However, it is seen that after 2012, more publications were started to be published about orthopedics and traumatology (p = .032) and the publications were published more in high-quartile journals (p = .014). There was no significant difference between the number of citations, where average citation per paper was 3.88±5.56 (h-index:12) prior to 2012 and 4.26±6.09 (h-index:14) after (p= .505). Conclusion: Considering the tendency of total publications between 2008-2017, a significant quantitative change is not observed for the second half of this ten-year period. However, contrary to the previous period, publications were accepted by high top-tier journals. It is evident that more incentives are needed to increase scientific productivity and stay competitive with the rest of the world.