Egyptian biomedical publications in PubMed, 1996-2005

This study aims to analyze ten-year (1996-2005) biomedical publications produced in Egypt in PubMed. A Medline search was performed on 12th December 2006 with the aid of PubMed to have the total number of publications of authors affiliated to Egyptian institutions for the last decade. The search was then saved in Medline format text files, which were converted into Excel file and then captured as a new database query via SPSS software including 6423 records of SPSS data file format. Results showed that the share of Egyptian publications from the total number of publications in PubMed has increased from 0.09% in 1996 to 0.14% in 2005. Review articles and clinical trial articles constituted only 3.41% and 6.9% respectively of the total publications. The average number of authors for the overall publications was 3.41, increasing over the last few years of the decade, and varied significantly according to the type of publication and the journal. The J Egypt Soc Parasitol followed by J Pharm Biomed Anal and East Mediterr Health J came on top of the list of 1139 journals that published the Egyptian studies (11.44%, 3.07% and 2.51% respectively).

Despite the increase in Egyptian publications, the ratio of review publications to its equivalent from the overall PubMed publications was not satisfactory. An increase in number of authors per publications was observed.