The lack of meaningful boundary differences between journal impact factor quartiles undermines their independent use in research evaluation

Evolution of scientific productivity in dentistry: tracking postgraduate publications at a Peruvian university

Introduction

Scientific production indicators help universities quantitatively and qualitatively assess postgraduate students' publications and contribute to the optimization of research processes. This study aimed to determine the frequency of publication in scientific journals of the documents submitted by postgraduate dentistry students to obtain a second professional specialty title and master's and doctoral degrees at a private Peruvian university over seven years.

Materials and methods

A cross-sectional study was conducted, considering the population and the records of documents submitted to obtain the second professional specialty title and the master's and doctoral degrees in dentistry at a private Peruvian university, published in its institutional repository from 2017 to 2023. The primary outcome was publication in scientific journals, and the covariates were the year of formal submission of the document, postgraduate level, modality of document preparation, area of dentistry specialty according to the American Dental Association, year of publication, international indexing, impact factor (IF), and quartile. A descriptive analysis was performed to obtain absolute and relative frequencies.

Results

Between 2017 and 2023, out of 322 documents submitted to receive the second professional specialty title and the master's and doctoral degrees published in the institutional repository, 72 were published in scientific journals. Of these, 81.94% (n = 59) were published in an internationally indexed scientific journal, with 13.56% (n = 8) published in a journal with an IF≥2 and 10.18% (n = 6) in a Q1 category journal.

Discussion

In low-income countries, the nexus between education and scientific output is multifaceted. While education serves as a critical catalyst, numerous challenges constrain the expansion of research. These nations contribute a mere 2% of global scientific production, despite confronting significant public health issues, underscoring a notable discrepancy between educational attainment and research productivity. The disparities in scientific output across universities in Latin America, Asia, and Europe are shaped by a confluence of cultural and economic determinants. In conclusion, 22.36% of the documents submitted to obtain the second professional specialty title and the master's and doctoral degrees by postgraduate dentistry students at a private Peruvian university over seven years were published in scientific journals.

Analysis of congenital heart disease research: Mapping impact, production and global collaboration

Background

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a severe childhood health problem worldwide. This study analyzes the scientific production on CHD published in Scopus during the last decade.

Methods

This study assessed the research on CHD conducted during the 2011-2020 period. Indexed publications were identified using a list of keywords consisting of MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) and Emtree (EMBASE) terms for the category "Congenital Heart Defects." The studies obtained were analyzed using the SciVal platform, and the production, impact, and collaboration indicators were considered. Additionally, an analysis of co-occurrence between countries and keywords was carried out with the VOSviewer software.

Results

The study found 8934 articles on CHD. A growing trend was observed during the last decade. The distribution of the scientific production at the international level shows that most publications are from the United States, China, and the United Kingdom, whereas Latin American countries have the lowest production. The articles analyzed contain a total of 89,835 citations. Most studies are published in high-impact journals (Q1), with 3273 studies corresponding to 39.3% of the total production analyzed. In the keyword analysis, we found five areas investigated.

Conclusions

Scientific production has shown sustained growth in the past years. Increased scientific production in specific research areas may have helped decrease morbimortality due to CHD.

The Influence of International Collaboration on the Scientific Impact in V4 Countries

Several strategies are used by researchers and research facilities to increase their scientific production and consequent research quality. Bibliometric records show that coauthorship and the number of participating organizations in research publications are steadily increasing; however, the effect of collaboration varies across disciplines, and the corresponding author’s country appears to influence research impact. This finding inspired our research question for this study: How does international cooperation affect scientific impact, and does the affiliation of corresponding authors influence citation impact indicators at the level of individual publications? To this end, we provide a comparative evaluation of research articles published in Q1 journals among Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in Medical and Health sciences between 2017 and 2021. The study investigates the relationship between collaboration type (national vs. international) and scientific impact (impact factor of the journal and category normalized citation impact or research papers), as well as the impact of the country of the corresponding author’s affiliation on quantitative quality of individual papers. We show that Q1 research papers in international collaboration have a higher scientific impact than papers published in national partnerships. Moreover, the corresponding authors’ country of affiliation significantly affects scientific impact.